Now a professional librarian, my engagement with comics is changing again as I begin serving on a graphic novel book prize committee for my state professional association. It’s time to shake off the rust and get to writing again! So welcome to The Return of Illustrated Man. For our first installment I’ll be taking up a subject neglected in the original run, superheroes, with a review of The Vision: Little Worse than a Man/ Little Better than a Beast (2016).

Marvel fans know Vision as one of the oldest characters of the Avengers, his Silver Age origins dating back to 1968. Despite his longevity Vision is not a heavy hitter among the superstar Marvel heroes and is typically only seen in the context of the Avengers group. I mean, he’s no Wolverine or Spider-Man. Casual fans may recognize him as a supporting character from the recent blockbusters Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) and Captain America: Civil War (2016). Perhaps because of his status as a relatively minor character in the Marvel canon, Vision was ripe for a reimagining and his latest iteration, a twelve issue run from 2016 now collected in two trade paperbacks, is stellar.

You do not need comprehensive knowledge of his background story to appreciate Little Worse than a Man/ Little Better than a Beast, but I will provide a very brief primer (for a more thorough survey read this). The Vision is an android and so has a curiously alienated relationship with humanity not unlike Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. In fact, according to Wikipedia, at his debut he has was sometimes compared to Spock, a character also introduced in the late 1960s. And like the treacherous android Bishop from the movie Alien, the Vision is also vaguely threatening to his allies. He was, after all, created by the robot villain Ultron, with whom he shares an odd quasi father-son kin relation, to be a weapon to destroy the Avengers. In becoming a hero rather than a villain as he was programmed to do by his father, Vision serves to comment on fate and free will. Finally, in a theme that resonates strongly with multiple science fiction traditions, Vision has a human romantic partner in the Scarlet Witch. Their relationship holds additional meaning for the Vision as his experience of romantic love and later, marriage and parenthood, serves to legitimate his claim to humanity.

Little Worse than a Man/ Little Better than a Beast is, in essence, a family drama. It is a tragedy, albeit one with a faint glimmer of sunlight at the end. Our story begins with the Vision having separated from the Scarlet Witch, his memory of their love erased in true soap opera fashion by a software reinstallation. Scarlet Witch gifts him her own brainwave patterns that Vision uses to create a female version of himself, Virginia, and the two of them create children, twin teenagers, Viv and Vin. Now a family, the Visions move to the suburbs and endeavor to become normal. And then their lives fall apart.

Our story opens on the family of robots experiencing constant low-level conflict with their neighbors who find them both fascinating and terrifying. Vision goes to work and worries about his paycheck, Virginia becomes a homemaker and appears to struggle with depression. The children go to high school and have trouble fitting in. Vin gets into a fight, Viv meets a boy, both teens lock horns with their parents. This kind of typical family drama stuff shows us how the Vision family is at their most human when they fail to be perfect. Seen in this light Little Worse than a Man/ Little Better than a Beast is reminiscent of another landmark deconstruction of the superhero genre, Astro City. Extraordinary people are shown to have ordinary problems.

The strange is made familiar. The familiar is made strange.

But despite the well meaning condescension and outright prejudice of their neighbors the Vision family cannot give up their quest to be human because to reject their humanity, to reject the very humans that shun them, is to leave the door open for Ultron. In the beginning Ultron creates Vision to be an agent of evil and in this series Vision creates his family out of himself. It’s like the New Testament by way of Being John Malkovich. That the Visions are all different versions of the same person serves to more deeply underline the inescapability of their fate. And yet they struggle, these born sinners, to seek out salvation.

In my reading one of the most interesting things about the Vision family is their experience of love, both romantic and domestic. Indeed it is their sympathetic portrayal as emotional beings that makes the tragic ending really stick. Whereas there are a number of science fiction entries that give humans and robots sharing emotions together, what are we to make of robots loving each other? And while we might imagine human on robot sex as promising an array of titillating pleasures, what about robot on robot sex? Robots that have desires? Robots that feel pleasure? Robots that have sex for the same reasons we have sex, to create and express social bonds.

In the domestic sphere science fiction typically presents robots as servants. Whether they are butlers, body guards, or doctors, in the robot’s world humans come first. Again, Little Worse than a Man/ Little Better than a Beast breaks new ground as the family argues at the dinner table, the mother worries about her children’s well being, the father plays with the kids, the brother and sister share a sibling rivalry. The Vision family shows us robots with autonomy, they just want to live their lives. But even this modest goal will lay beyond their grasp. Its heartbreaking.

As volume one closes and the book’s central tragedy is foreshadowed, a high school literature teacher introduces Vin to The Merchant of Venice and he becomes obsessed with Shylock. Fortunately, this rhetorical moves turn out to be more clever than cliche. After all revenge and Avenger do share a root (one the act of a villain, the other a hero’s victory). With melancholy wonder Vin asks if you prick him, does he not bleed? Given the body count at the end of the series Othello might have worked just as well, but in this case I think the literary allusion is welcome.

For anthropologists who are also comic fans The Vision: Little Worse than a Man/ Little Better than a Beast is a must read, this book will redefine how you see a classic character. It invites deep, critical reflection about what is so unique about being a human and the practice of how we might better understand ourselves. The ending just floored me, I nearly cried.

Casual fans and colleagues interested in anthropology and science fiction, especially robots and the cultural imaginary, will find this to be a thoughtful genre piece that invites us to see human beings from an android’s point of view. You do not need deep, nerdy levels of knowledge about Marvel superheroes to enjoy this story and the book itself does a good job of filling the reader in on background elements as the narrative warrants.

While this would make good reading for teens it is not appropriate for children who may find that the grim, mature themes fly over their heads. One of my own teens read it and said it was “good,” which is fairly high praise coming from her. I was able to find volume one in my public library and picked up volume two at an independent bookstore for $13. It definitely stands up to multiple readings.

Tulpamancers are people who, through extended bouts of concentration and visualization, produce a special kind of imaginary friend that they call a tulpa. Tulpas are understood to be distinct sentient beings with their own personalities, inclinations and (relative) autonomy. Through various active and passive processes known as ‘forcing’ tulpamancers spend hours solidifying their impressions of their creations as something more than just an ordinary inner voice. (Active forcing means concentrating single-pointedly on the tulpa’s form and features, passive forcing is when the tulpamancer finds ways to bring tulpas into more regular routines, such as through ‘narrating’, where tulpamancers chat with or read stories to their creations). Tulpamancers meet tulpas in imagined environments called ‘wonderlands’, dream or mind-scapes that more fully contextualize interactions and provide a place for tulpas to ‘hang out’ when idle. They also work to perfect ‘imposition’ -seeing, hearing, or feeling tulpas in the ‘real world’ – and may practice tulpa-possession or even ‘switching’, where the tulpa takes over the host’s body and the host temporarily occupies the tulpa’s form in the wonderland.

If this is news for you, you might be wondering where this all comes from. The deceptively simple answer is: Tibet. Tulpa (sprul pa, སྤྲུལ་པ) is a Tibetan word meaning ’emanation’, ‘apparition’ or ‘magical illusion’, and the practices of contemporary tulpamancers are supposedly modeled on the esoteric procedures of Tibetan mystics, who we are often told, have been producing sentient mental-entities through meditation for centuries. Except they haven’t. Well, sort of.

Before the advent of online tulpamancer communities, and notwithstanding its Tibetan name, the concept of the tulpa as a semi-autonomous entity created by one or more individuals’ focused thought or belief was primarily a mainstay in Western esoteric and parapsychological circles. Western occultists inherited their version of tulpas from early non-Tibetan interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism like French explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) and American Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965). David-Neel’s description of how she experimented with making a tulpa in the form of a ‘jolly monk’ while in Tibet – and her account of how this ‘mind-creature’ was subsequently seen by others who mistook it for an actual person, and how it became more and more sinister, self-motivated and unruly which obliged her to dissolve it – helped set the tone and terms of subsequent representations of tulpas. Further, as Natasha Mikles and Joseph Laycock have laid out nicely in a recent article, both David-Neel and Evan-Wentz’s understanding of Tibetan tulpas was in turn strongly influenced by Theosophical teachings related to the possibilities and dangers of ‘thought-forms’ and ‘elementals’. These ideas were already in circulation in Europe and America long before either David-Neel or Evan-Wentz ever went to the Himalayas to study with Tibetans. Thus, as Mikles and Laycock put it (paralleling my own earlier arguments here on Savage Minds about both Tibetan aliens and Tibetan singing bowls, popular ideas about tulpas today are a product of complex dialogues or cross-fertilizations between ‘East and West’, and, to be fair, probably owe more to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism.

The tulpa concept has evolved and circulated to the point where it has escaped far beyond any specifically Tibetan cultural, social or linguistic moorings. During the last two decades or so, the idea of tulpas has migrated from Western esotericism and parapsychology to enter online forums and global pop culture. Tulpas have featured in episodes of hit shows like the X-files and Supernatural over the last seven years or so. In October of 2013, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wrote about tulpamancers in an op-ed for the New York Times. She compared tulpamancers to evangelical Christians who put in serious cognitive-emotional elbow grease to experience God as a sensory reality in their everyday lives, and argued that tulpamancers’ experiences with tulpas supports anthropologists’ and evolutionary psychologists’ claims that “the idea of an invisible agent is basic to our psyche”. I started writing this piece a week or few ago after I discovered that Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time had, as recently as a month ago, devoted a whole episode to the tulpa concept. As someone who has studied and practiced Western magical traditions for many years, I was familiar with talk about tulpas, and had been tracking with interest how representations of the entities periodically surfaced in popular culture. Watching the Adventure Time episode though, the fact that an occult concept like tulpas was now receiving treatment in one of the biggest ‘kid’s’ cartoons on TV today (even after the advent of online tulpamancers), was just too much for my feverish little anthropologist brain.

Since the appearance of Nathan Thompson’s 2014 Vice article, scholars, Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, Western occultists, and tulpamancers have debated the extent to which tulpas are and aren’t Tibetan. I decided I should gather my thoughts and say something at least vaguely meaningful about the popularization of the tulpa concept. That I should give an overview, a back-and-forth for readers about the ‘East-West tulpa dialogue’, and try to say something new and interesting on the topic, at least as far as my unique expertise might allow.

And then, just on Monday, February 8th, the latest episode of the X-Files Season 10 re-boot aired, and scooped me, kind of.

In many ways, the episode referenced the very material I was working on in this piece. With discussions about the relative (in)accessibility of academic writing and the unbearable slowness of publishing ongoing, anthropologists certainly appreciate whatever chance they can get to feel topical and up-to-the-minute. Monday’s X Files episode gave me all that and more. Not only could I pat myself on the head about being on the money, but the episode’s treatment of the subject seemed to validate many of the points I had already written down. For not only has the tulpa gone viral, but as I’ll try to show and argue, it has come to embody both fantasies and fears about virality itself, about mass cultural production and consumption in the digital age, in a manner very different to when a tulpa first trended in an X Files ‘monster of the week’ episode in 1999.

As an anthropologist doing research on both contemporary Tibetan societies and contemporary Western esotericism it’s naturally tempting for me to jump in and offer my own two cents about what a tulpa ‘really’ is. Rather than only focus on what distinguishes different kinds of tulpa though, I also want to pause and reflect on what they might have in common. In Monday’s new X Files episode FBI agent Fox Mulder offers a rejoinder to his own previous take on Tibetan tulpas from the earlier episode in the franchise. This recent episode’s presentation (which I discuss more fully below) confirms my suspicions that Tibetan and non-Tibetan tulpas alike can offer equally rich material for thinking about topics like the popularizing and secularizing of esoteric knowledge, mass mediation and collective affect, and the policing of the imagination and the ‘imaginary’.

So if tulpas aren’t exactly Tibetan, what are Tibetan tulpas? To her credit, even if her presentation of tulpas was idiosyncratic, hybrid or misleading, in addition to describing her own experiments, David-Neel did discuss many of the broader connotations of tulpa in Tibetan contexts. While there are no explicit instructions in Tibetan tantric Buddhism for ‘manifesting a tulpa’, various advanced meditative practices do exist which involve intensive concentration on and visualization of imagined entities. The ‘dream yoga’ practices that fall under the umbrella of the ‘Six Dharmas of Naropa’ in particular involve training in the intentional production of mental forms while in a lucid dream-state, and the the so-called ‘generation’ or ‘creation’ stage (bsked rim) of Tibetan tantric yogas requires the meditator to imagine, call upon and then ‘animate’ various yidams (yid dam) or ‘mind-bound’ meditational deities so as to draw near to them, experience them and attain their blessings. Accordingly, both Tibetan Buddhists and Western occultists have argued that yid dam represent a better analog for Western esotericists’ and tulpamancers’ ideas about sentient mental entities than the actual Tibetan word sprul pa.

One commentator on a Reddit tulpa feed who identified themself as a longstanding practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism celebrates what tulpamancers are doing, and points out that their practices are “all very much in line with the spiritual ‘development’ stages in Tibetan Buddhism’. “Tulpa is an accurate description of these daemons” (i.e. Yidams) the poster says. Yet another practitioner of both Western ceremonial magic and Tibetan Buddhism called Kalagni, taking a more exasperated tone and reiterating Mikles and Laycock’s misgivings about David-Neel’s presentation of tulpa, explains in a blog post entitled “Tulpa: Not What You Think” that “a tulpa is something used all the time in Vajrayana (i.e. Tibetan tantric) Buddhism, though the word is almost never used.” This poster equates tulpas with the dam tshig sems dpa’ or ‘tantric vow/commitment being’, an imagined, inner form of the tantric meditational deity into which the ye shes sems dpa’ (or gnosis-being), the actual deity itself, is invited.

Despite these comparisons, tulpamancers’ use of tulpas as friends, companions, confidants and psycho-therapeutic tools has next to nothing in common with the specifics of yid dam and their complex role in Tibetan culture and tantric Buddhist soteriology. For the most part, online tulpamancers are not Tibetan, are not converts to Tibetan religions, and are not necessarily particularly informed about or even interested in Tibet and its cultural practices either. Yet despite this, and non-Tibetan blogger Kalagni’s claim that the Tibetan word sprul pa is not widely used or known by Tibetans, the term sprul pa in fact plays a key role in one of the most important and controversial issues facing Tibetans both inside and outside of Tibet today, namely the question of the current Dalai Lama’s succession.

The Tibetan word sprul pa is generally used to refer to an emanation or magical projection that is sent forth by a Buddha, a Bodhisattva, a god, demi-god, demon, or accomplished yogi to serve some particular mediating function. As a concept, sprul pa is strongly linked to if not synonymous with the term tulku (sprul sku). Sprul sku (a typical Tibetan contraction for sprul pa’i sku gzugs, or ’emanational body’) is the name commonly given to a reincarnate lama, such as the Dalai Lama. High lamas and accomplished yogis like the Dalai Lama are understood to be able to consciously decide when they will die, as well as how (and whether) they will take rebirth in order to help beings. (The current Dalai Lama is not only the re-incarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, he is also a sprul pa of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Buddha being who according to scripture helped father the Tibetan people via another of his emanational bodies, that of a mild-mannered monkey – see this previous post for more on that story).

‘Sprul sku’ was initially coined as the Tibetan translation for nirmanakaya, a Sanskrit word connected to the Buddhist doctrine of the sku gsum, the three bodies of the Buddha, or three dimensions of existence. This Buddhist ‘Trinity’ provided a way to account for the Buddha’s manifestation within a (seemingly) perishable body, ‘within’ history. It served to explain the relationship between the person of the historical Buddha, the timeless ultimate nature of reality and enlightened mind, and a plethora of a- or trans-historical ‘celestial’ Buddhas and Bodhisattvas which came to feature so strongly in Mahayana Buddhism. Emanation and emanational bodies in Tibetan Buddhism are thus associated with the compassionate agency of higher beings. Emanation is a process of mediation whereby transcendent powers secure beneficial channels for communicating with and acting for the benefit of beings orientated differently in consciousness. Although most strongly associated with enlightened beings, worldly, unrealized beings like mountain gods or even influential human political figures can either send out their own sprul pa or be seen as sprul pa themselves. (A list of political figures recognized as tulpas of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas includes, depending on who you ask, the early Tibetan kings, Bill Clinton and Queen Victoria).

In 2011, in tandem with his devolving of political power to a democratically elected exile prime minister, the Dalai Lama released a public statement where he stressed that the Chinese government had no jurisdiction to interfere in the matter of his succession. In statements over the years, the leader has suggested that given the current political climate in Communist Chinese occupied Tibet, as well as China’s track record of attempting to co-opt identified reincarnate lamas or to install their own substitute candidates, he would most probably reincarnate outside of Chinese territory. In the 2011 statement he also noted that it was completely feasible that his successor could appear via emanation (i.e. sprul pa) and thus be identified before his own death. To clarify this distinction the Dalai Lama quoted the great 19th century Tibetan scholar Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo:

“As Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo stated: “[The reincarnation of a lama] is said to be when they take their rebirth after the bodily display/arrangement of the previous life has dissolved; emanation is the manifesting of other emanations without the (current) emanation-basis having dissolved.””
འཇམ་དབྱངས་མཁྱེན་བརྩེ་དབང་པོས། སྐུ་ཡི་བཀོད་པ་སྔ་མ་བསྡུས་ནས་ཕྱི་མ་བཟུང་བར་སྐྱེ་བ་དང། སྤྲུལ་གཞི་མ་བསྡུས་པར་སྤྲུལ་པ་གཞན་དག་སྟོན་པ་སྤྲུལ་པ་ཞེས་བཞེད། ཅེས་གསུངས།

What this would mean is that the next Dalai Lama would probably be recognized before the current one passes away, and could well be identified as an adult and not a child. This move would strategically cut out the typically unstable interregnum period that normally precedes the successor’s coming of age, and would further exclude Chinese authorities from the succession process. The Dalai Lama also stated that he has decided that when he reaches about 90 years old, he will re-open the question of the future of his lineage (and whether or how he should reincarnate) ‘for discussion by the great lamas of the (various) dharma lineages and the Tibetan people’. The Dalai Lama has thus not only used the creative tension and complexity implicit in the rather recondite relationship between emanations and emanation bodies to his strategic and political advantage, he has also allowed for the possibility that the typically esoteric and private workings of the trained yogi skilled in the practice of conscious transference from one body to the next (‘pho ba) might be submitted for consideration to a wider, vaguely more democratic audience.

To call this a secularization of reincarnation/emanation processes would be wrong-headed. The Dalai Lama himself has stressed that reincarnation is above all else a religious matter. His future referendum is a far cry from the secularizing of reincarnation politics that has taken place in China, where the CCP has required lamas to get bureaucratic permission to reincarnate since 2007 and has just recently set up an online data-base of authentic (state-approved, of course) ‘Living Buddhas’ as part of its regulation and ‘protection’ of the integrity of the faith. The matter of finding the Dalai Lama’s successor will still primarily involve a select group of spiritual detectives – of uniquely qualified Tibetan lamas, deities, and diviners. Still, the Dalai Lama’s statements are at the very least a gesture towards the de-privatizing and democratizing of esoteric emanation procedures typically associated with the inner psychic workings of an individual yogi-transmigrator.

With tulpamancers we see a somewhat different popularizing and secularizing of the esoteric at work. Although tulpamancers acknowledge a split between ‘metaphysical’ and psychological/neurological explanations for tulpas, much of tulpamancer discourse has a decidedly secular flavor. The approaches of today’s tulpamancers undoubtedly owe a lot to earlier developments in Western esotericism, and chaos magic(k) in particular (see here, for example) (In contrast to a lot of tulpamancer methodology, Western magical approaches for making ‘artificial spirits’ have often, although not always, involved the use of sexual fluids and orgasm as part of sex magic practices). An agnostic-experimental orientation to supernatural entities, more ‘science-y’ frameworks for magic, the online dissemination of esoterica, and working with ‘fabricated’ gods and spirits permitted chaos magicians to go beyond the methodologies and religious-moral baggage of more traditional magical systems. Still, despite the precedent set by such ‘post-modern’ occultists, tulpamancers rarely seem to claim that what they are doing is based on particularly specialized esoteric knowledge or access. Just as David-Neel did with her trial-and-error Friar-Tuck-Frankenstein, tulpamancers use whatever concentration and visualization techniques they may have learned in experimental and idiosyncratic ways. No one method works, tulpamancers often say, and firm effort, as well as trusting that producing sentience is possible, are ultimately more important factors than cleaving to any specific approach. Tulpamancers thus present a case of individuals who, though they are not practitioners of spiritual disciplines or members of initiated esoteric lineages, choose to engage in degrees of mental ‘asceticism’ usually associated with these other contexts. More than this, where ritual magicians typically make tulpas (or what are called servitors, thought-forms, bud-wills, psychogones and so on) to fulfill specific magical tasks (and while Tibetan Buddhists visualize yidam as part of specific religious practices), tulpamancers actively distinguish their tulpa companions from what they see as dumb, de-individualized servitor ‘slaves’. Instead, for the most part, tulpamancers describe making tulpas out of curiosity and loneliness, or to bring fictional characters they’d previously imagined as part of personal creative projects to greater life.

In contrast to this picture of individual, focused psychic and affective labor, popular representations often frame tulpas as both unintentional and uncontrollable. Popular media tulpas are powered primarily by collective thought and belief. Appearing unexpectedly and almost too easily, they bring terror and/or murder in their wake. In the 1999 ‘monster of the week’ X-Files episode (“Arcadia”, Season 6, Episode 15) FBI agents Mulder and Scully discover that the president of a plush planned community in California has used Tibetan magic to create a tulpa with which to menace and ultimately murder any resident who fails to abide by his exhaustive list of rules. In an apt embodiment of Kathleen Stewart’s ‘failed miracle’ of American suburbia, the tulpa, taking temporary corporeal form as a vaguely humanoid, living embodiment of the mud and lawns around the gated community, murders its creator, following which it too expires. In an episode of CW’s Supernatural (“Hell House”, Season 1, episode 17), internet users who read stories on a website about a haunted house in Texas, will a ghost from fabricated legend into existence, and this spirit begins to actually murder people in the house in question. In another episode (“Thinman”, Season 9, Episode 15), the show’s protagonists, demon-hunting brothers Dean and Sam, investigate a series of murders that appear to have been perpetrated by the ‘Thinman’, another figure from online urban legend, who the brothers suspect may have been brought to life through focused belief. In the end, they discover that human killers are impersonating the Thinman to perpetuate belief in him.

Supernatural’s Thinman character and his online fans were inspired by the Slender Man, a ‘real-world’ internet bogieman and meme whose mythos has been elaborated extensively via fanfiction, web serials, online games, and other media ever since its first dramatic appearance on a Something Awful forum thread in 2009. Digital folklore relating to the Slender Man includes theories that this tall, faceless entity is in fact a tulpa, created by collective belief. Disturbingly, Supernatural’s Thinman episode weirdly foreshadowed actual events relating to Slender Man that took place in Waukesha, Wisconsin two and a half months after the show aired. On March 31, 2014, two 12 year old girls in Waukesha attempted to stab a 12 year old schoolmate to death as a sacrifice to Slender Man. The two girls, who had read about Slender Man on the horror short-story site Creepypasta.com, said they hoped that this act would not only impress Slender Man and allow them to serve as his ‘proxies’, but would also convince skeptics that the being was real. The attempted murder saw a spate of commentary on the influence of the internet and popular culture on child psychology. Retired FBI agent John Egelhof, for example, opined that the internet had become a ‘blackhole’ of sinister influences and urged parents to better surveil and control their children’s browsing habits.

Contemporary descriptions of tulpas draw on a wide-ranging archive of ideas and images relating to human consciousness, creativity, and the paranormal. They hover in the grey areas between fantasy and reality, legend and fact, juvenile and adult affinities, and individual, ‘inner’ experience and mass-mediated culture. In being popularized, tulpas have come to embody the mysteries and dangers of popularism itself, of collective belief, mass-attention and virtual mediation. To put a twist on the old anthropological chestnut, ‘the tulpa is good to think with – and not good to think too much about’. As Mikles and Laycock note, tulpa-theory ‘para-normalizes’ cultural explanations for paranormal trends. Rather than explaining away the persistance of particular paranormal phenomena, consensual belief becomes the magic itself. Tulpas both provide an ‘answer’ to the recursivity of reality and representation, to the circularity of cultural influence (culture-produces-thought-produces-culture?) and float like an uneasy question mark over ever-fidgety boundaries between inside and out, self and other.

Tulpas of whatever variety point primarily to issues of mediation, affect and imagination. The Chinese Communist Party seeking to regulate ‘illusionary’ processes of emanational manifestation – illusory both in the official atheist sense of ‘not really, but culturally true’ and in the ‘impermanent forms as magical display’ Buddhist one; parents and lawmakers fretting over the migration of concepts and images from computer screens, through their children’s minds out into the world – each represent attempts to police the imaginary, to regulate, channel and contain collective affect and its powers. As William Mazzarella has recently shown, classic anthropological thinking about magic lends itself especially well to theorising mass media and censorship (indeed, the sympathies between ’emanations’, new technologies and magic are suggested by sprul itself, whose related form ‘phrul appears in Tibetan in words to do with ‘supernatural’ magic, legerdemain, machines and technology). In lines to make any sorceror proud, Mazzarella defines the ‘mana of mass publicity’ as being about “strategically deployed constitutive resonance via a magnetizer that may or may not be human – and who may or may not become a fetish – that is to say, come to embody the charismatic source of that resonance. The substance is our collective mimetic archive: the residue, embedded not only in the explicity articulated forms commonly recognized as cultural discourses, but also in our built environment and our material forms, in the concrete history of our senses, and in the habits of our shared embodiment.”

Tulpa could be said to partake of these processes. Concerns about the regulating of the ‘imaginary’, about censorship and violence, fears and fantasies about the private becoming public, about being watched and influenced by shadowy others shaped in our own image, about the dark recesses of cyberspace, speak to Mazzarella’s ideas about the mana of mass publicity as something ‘extimate’ in the Lacanian sense. “The other is something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me”, the French psychoanalyst tells us. This tension is as present for Tibetans orientating their sense of individual being-in-the-world in relation to the emanated form of a reincarnate lama-cum-national hero as it is for tulpamancers, whose mental companions are at once intensely intimate and in need of constant investment and care, yet live beyond them in the virtual spaces of the imagination and online and journalistic mediation.

To say that tulpamancers, the X Files and Adventure Time have ‘secularized’ the esoteric is perhaps somewhat misleading. As Lancaster University sociologist Christopher Partridge has observed, the popularization of magic and occultism is arguably as much about the sacralization or re-enchantment of the contemporary as about the secularizing of time-honoured esoteric traditions. As Patridge has argued recently, since the 1960s we have witnessed a global situation where the occult is no longer truly ‘hidden’, where the meaning of ‘privileged’ or ‘initiated’ knowledge has shifted. As Partridge puts it “(global) society is witnessing a confluence of secularization and sacralization, at the heart of which is the deceptively influential (concept of) ‘occulture'”. For Patridge, occulture refers to the particular environments in which ideas relating to the occult, the esoteric, and the conspiratorial emerge, are disseminated, and become influential. Today, pop culture is both an agent and a site for occultural discourse.

With the turn away from organized religiosity and ‘traditional modes of authority’, spirituality has come to replace religion as a category of choice in post-industrial, affluent, information-rich contexts. It is not so much then, that as Weber predicted, modernity means less religious societies, but that today the sacred is differently positioned and enacted. For the demographics most interested in tulpamancy, reliance on organized religion has been replaced by increased investment in personal experience and authority. The contemporary pursuit of illuminated knowledge, of human self-actualization, transformation, or gnosis, while driven by an interest in transcendence, nonetheless also ties into neo-liberal forms of affect and production. This turn to and sacralization of the self is predicated on post-industrial values, on having the time, money and wherewithal to focus on self-exploration, on the construction of new selves. The popularizing of discourse about tulpas exemplifies Patridge’s argument about occulture being both ordinary and everyday. While the broader public (or tulpamancers for that matter) may not necessarily credit occultists’ claims about tulpas, the dissemination of these can influence new patterns of thought and behavior. Previously, in my discussion of Tibetan singing bowls, I likened the rapid back-and-forth between the popular and the esoteric to ‘resonating feedback loops’. By being turned on through popular dissemination to potentially more initiated esoteric material, occultural consumers can do further research, only to subsequently re-project their new understandings and ideas yet again into the popular domain. In the 1990s Buffy the Vampire Slayer dramatized (and normalized) modern witchcraft. Encouraged by such popular representation, teenagers sought out real-world information on witchcraft, and became witches themselves. They then went on to produce their own expert and emic knowledge, knowledge that continues to inform contemporary popular representations as much as ethnographic ones. Adventure Time’s representations of tulpas may yet lead viewers to read up on or even practice tulpamancy. Popular culture animates occult and esoteric ideas, Partridge says, and here it does so literally.

Stories about the Thinman as Slender Man, Slender Man as tulpa, about the made-up ghost called Philip paranormal experimenters imagined into wider circulation in the 70s, capture the allure and alarm of trying to study and categorize the charged spaces of urban legend and conspiracy theory, of dream-made-flesh. They alert us to the difficulties of tracking trajectories of affect and attention in the digital age, of capturing the virtual and imaginary ethnographically . As Kathleen Stewart says so nicely in Ordinary Affects, writing about affect and urban legends, “scenes of public attention routinely drift over the fence of official news into eccentric circulation”. Arguments for my clairvoyant abilities aside, Monday’s episode of the X Files brings her poetic insights to life.

In “Home Again” agents Mulder and Scully investigate a series of murders connected to the forcible removal of homeless people and the gentrification of urban neighbourhoods in Philadelphia. We learn that, as IndieWire’s reviewer sums it up “Scully’s mom died. It was sad. A trash Golem murdered a bunch of not-great people. Mulder and Scully hugged some and talked about the baby they gave up for adoption. Again, it was sad.” This ‘trash golem’, a malodorous spirit avenger for the homeless who travels in a garbage truck and tears apart city officials, art thieves, and school board presidents, is called the ‘Band-aid nose man’, and turns out to have been conjured up by the angry creative impulses of a Banksy-esque graffiti artist and activist known by the tag ‘Trashman’. As details about the killings unfold, we are treated to an at times painfully forced overlaying of the Band-aid nose man plot with Scully’s experiences dealing with the death of her mother and her guilt and regret about giving up her and Mulder’s son for adoption.Towards the climax of the episode, the agents discover Trashman’s hide-out. After a brief run in with some ‘glitchy’ tulpas, they break into the Trashman’s dark basement studio, where a clay and trash bag sculpture of the Band-aid nose man is housed. The Trashman, after telling the agents that guns won’t work on the spirits and that “if they don’t see me and I don’t see them they can’t hurt me”, offers the following diatribe:

Trashman: (pontificating, looking Banksy-esque, surrounded by stencils, art supplies and  candles) The streets, the homeless, the street people, they ain’t got no voice, right? They get treated like trash- I mean, actual trash. It’s like this: you throw your grande cup, or your pop barn in the right trash been under the sink, recycling is here, there, you tie it in a bag, you take it out, put it in the right dumpsters, you pat yourself on the head, you are a good person, yeah? You do the good thing, you fuck all the women, you love all the little animals. Friday come, Wednesday maybe, guys will come to take the trash away, it’s not your problem anymore. Magic! But it is your problem-because it piles up in a landfill, and plastic leaks toxins into the water and the sky, but if you don’t see a problem there is no problem. People treat people like trash.

Mulder then asks if the Trashman was responsible for the killings.

Trashman: Nah, I was just trying to give those people voice, the only way I know how. Through art. Not violence. Something I could put around town, so it wouldn’t be forgotten. A stencil that looked over the bad suit building man, looked down on the long nosed suburban lady.

Mulder: Well, why’d you put up the art after the fact, the morning of Cuttler’s murder?

Trashman: I didn’t… That… That wasn’t me.I only thought em up, you know? Those people that got killed, that was only him.

Mulder: Him? Who’s him?

Trashman: You saw those things in the hall…(referring to the glitchy vanishing-and-reappearing monsters that walked blindly past the agents and into a wall)

Mulder: Yeah.

Trashman: I made them. I didn’t mean to, but I made ’em. They’ll go away eventually, they’re fading. But the Band aid nose man (pointing at sculpture, zoom in, ominous music) He’s different. (Cut to Scully). (Glibly now) Tibetan Buddhists call’em a tulpa, a thought form, using mind and energy to will consciousness (now placing hands on bald, tattooed head) into existence.

Mulder: Tulpa is a 1929 Theosophist mis-translation of the Tibetan word Tulku meaning ‘a manifestation body’. There is no idea in Tibetan Buddhism of a ‘thought-form’ or ‘thought-as-form’ and a realized Tulku would never harm anyone let alone kill.

Trashman: Ok. But I’m telling you. I spend a lot of energy in my art. I uh meditated on it. I willed it. (Flashback to Trashman sketching). What I wanted him to look like, what I wanted him to be, and why I wanted him (Scully’s flashback of her own labour) I didn’t bring him here, he came to me! (Scully stares into the distance, hallucinates a baby mobile, Scully’s baby in crib crying) But in the end, he told me what he wanted to be. All we do is hold the pencil, all we do is hold the clay. I think there must be spirits or souls, (Over-the-shoulder shot of Trashman sketching the Band-aid nose man), floating all around us. And if you think real hard, and you want them so bad (Mulder and Scully cradling their crying baby) they come to you, and then they become alive with a life of their own. (Scully’s mother’s death scene, Scully crying, “Our son, I gave him up!”) This, this is what came to me, in my dreams, or some other place, yeah? But now it’s alive, and it’s out there, down to the band-aid I used to hold the clay in place. Who would copy this? And did you smell that? That smells like nothing on this earth. It has its own life, it does what it wants. I just want to scare ’em, scare anyone that took the [indistinct] away from the homeless, that’s when the violent idea popped in my head. It was just an emotion that ran through my head. An idea is dangerous, even a small one, but now it uses that violent idea (close up on Scully, overcome). He thinks that’s what he is supposed to do.

Scully: (At last speaking up, in a revelatory tone) You’re responsible! (Trashman looks quizzically at Mulder) If you made the problem, if it was your idea, then you’re responsible. You put it out of sight so that it wouldn’t be your problem (whether talking to him or herself unclear) but you’re just as bad as the people that you hate.

Here Mulder’s objection is a little over-zealous. As we have seen, there ARE Tibetan tulpas. Even if they aren’t born of angsty art and don’t ride around in trash vans, they are nonetheless manifestations of yogis’, gods’ and lamas’ focused intention. What is interesting however, is how “Home Again”‘s update of its own tulpa discourse speaks to a current occultural moment. Whereas the tulpa of 1999’s ‘Arcadia’ embodied the contradictions and sublimated desires of a suburban elite, 2016’s incarnation is a truly popular tulpa, a champion of the unwashed masses, of the victims of gentrification who live beyond insular, gated worlds of privilege. Made of and for human waste, Band-aid nose man is the hero in a modern-day cautionary tale about commoditized attention, dehumanization and issues of climate and urban change denialism that are global in scope. Moreover, an increase in the circulation and availability of information about both tulpa creation and Tibetan Buddhism has conspired to give us a wiser, more cautious Mulder. Whereas in 1999, Mulder could gloss a tulpa as “a Tibetan thought-form…a living, breathing creature willed into existence by someone who possesses that ability”, now in 2016 he refutes his own earlier claims as simplistic and misinformed. Whereas in 1999 Mulder is required merely to cite exotic esoteric ideas to make sense of the supernatural, in 2016 his paranormal expertise rests on being able to critically evaluate and even refute ’emic’ claims.

Mapping occultural, popular flows is challenging work. As Patridge has noted, by the time we scholars research, write and disseminate our reifications of pop occultural phenomena we are already out of date. Reddit and Facebook users have beat me to discussing and dissecting Monday’s X Files episode. Back-and-forths happen faster than can be tracked, let alone academically digested. And yet I believe that at least attempting to digest such flows is important. Tulpamancers, modern occultists, the representatives of affluent, information rich, self-oriented societies on which Partridge focuses may all be motivated by very different interests and problems to Tibetan refugees. And yet in today’s more informed milieu, dialogues between traditions and the shifting between vocabularies and frameworks is ongoing and complex. Trashman may not be sure or persuasive about the Tibetan-ness of his creations (or that tulpas are even ‘creations’ at all), but he knows what has worked and what he has experienced. Likewise, whether or not Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhists know or care about Western-style tulpas they too can access and contribute to discussions about them. Both occultists and non-occultists watch Adventure Time’s casual invocations of Aleister Crowley’s esoteric religion, both Tibetans and non-Tibetans watch its sneaky references to esoteric Buddhist concepts like the ‘rainbow body’ (‘ja’ lus).

In yet another example of reverberating feed-back loops, professional writer and sorcerer Jason Miller, who is an initiate of both Western and Tibetan Buddhist esoteric lineages, recently discussed with me a chapbook he is preparing on tulpa creation. Jason is well aware that ‘tulpa’ means something very different in Tibetan contexts compared to non-Tibetan ones. Yet as he explained to me, his book is based on the premise: “Tulpas dont work like that…. But what if they did? How WOULD Tibetans do such a thing?” By drawing on his familiarity with multiple ritual-meditative traditions, Jason has developed approaches to making Western magic-style ‘thought forms’ or servitors that draw inspiration from Tibetan Mahayoga bskyed rim structures without claiming to be synonymous with or equivalent to them. This kind of informed syncretism, like 2016’s Mulder, is arguably a product of a different, ‘wiser and more cautious’ moment, a time of greater information and greater discernment than David-Neel’s own period. It remains to be seen how much a new generation of Tibetans may engage with occultural discourses around tulpas. In the end, cultural production itself, like tulpas and magical emanations, appears solid and graspable one minute and mutates the next. And like all magical and phantasmagoric things, it can appear alternatively terrifying, absurd, or beautiful depending on how you look.

Non-sports fans, let me set the stage.

Over the course of the basketball season the teams play each other and develop reputations for their skill (or lack thereof), and the culmination of the season is a tournament in which only select teams are invited to play. There’s a lot of drama leading up to the tournament as a convoluted selection process decides which teams will play and in what order they will meet. As the anticipation builds and the media hype machine goes into overdrive we often hear the basketball tournament marketed as “the Dance” or “the Big Dance.” In this narrative the selection process is likened to a courtship ritual, with the teams as available women each of whom wants to make herself appear as desirable as possible in order to draw the most attention from suitors.

The selection process results in a numerical ranking for each team that represents their quality. The contest begins by pitting the weakest against the strongest. In theory this should give the strongest teams the best chance for advancing, but every year their are surprising upsets in which the underdog beats a heavily favored team.

If an underdog wins twice in row it is said to be a “Cinderella.” In this well known folktale, Cinderella, a girl in a structurally disadvantaged position in her family, undergoes a transformation in which she is revealed to be more beautiful and powerful than her mother (and sisters) who had previously tormented her. In the Disney version of this tale, the version most popular among young people in America, Cinderella goes to a dance with her identity masked and while she’s there she is courted by a Prince as her sisters and mother look on powerless to stop her.

Note how the tournament proper begins with 64 teams. The games commence and the winners advance to the round of 32. After the conclusion of the second round of the tournament there are only 16 teams remaining and these are said to be the “Sweet Sixteen.” Sweet Sixteen is also the name given to an American coming of age ritual, typically for girls.

Thus it is possible for a college basketball fan to say something like, “Well at first it didn’t look like we were going to make it to the Big Dance but we had a Cinderella season and made it all the way to the Sweet Sixteen.”

Isn’t it interesting that the success of male athletes, who are celebrated for performing a particular kind of masculinity that emphasizes physical prowess, would be heralded in a narrative that prominently featured feminizing metaphors! What is going on here?

I came up with two ideas.

One. What is feminized about the team is all of their emotions, their hopes and dreams of success. This part of the team is delicate and vulnerable like a woman and thus in need of protection. By winning in their sport the athletes are full of glee and their emotions run over like girls at a dance. These pleasures are even more special to Cinderella because once she was below her sisters and mother, now she is in the spotlight enjoying things denied to those who would presume to be her betters. Victory at sport keeps this precious girl safe and at the dance a little longer.

Two.The teams are feminized in the way that men might name a car or a boat after a woman. As objects women can be desired the way that cars are desired, they’re beautiful and status symbols. They make other men envy you. Similarly for the basketball teams, the more they win the more their fans can celebrate them by possessing them, they’re victory makes you superior to the fans of other teams. There is some overlap here with first interpretation because desirable objects are also in need of protection, particularly from theft.

The tournament champion then has the chance to be remasculinized and its the tournament itself that is made feminine. The losing teams then become like failed suitors who must leave the Dance rejected, while the champion team is the one that has been chosen by the prettiest girl. At the end of the last game the winning team gathers to have their picture taken with the trophy and give it a symbolic kiss.

Tell me I’m not crazy. Y’all analyze random stuff in your minds all the time too, right?

You know that little purple stone that is on the bad guys hammer? THAT IS POWER OF ANTHROPOLOGY? And what does it take fully harness that power? Four brave heroes who EACH REPRESENT ONE OF THE FOUR SUBFIELDS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. They even have to temporarily kill off Groot — who represents the maybe-fifth-subfield of applied anthropology — in order to make it work.

I’m still up in the air on who is what subfield. Right now my thinking is this: Peter Quill is cultural anthropology: The most important but also the spaciest hero. Why is he in charge, other than some sort of default assumption that white guys are the lead hero even when they don’t even do ethnography any more and are just charming con artists. Gamora represents linguistic anthropology: overly-professional, uptight, kinda corky, but actually has much better fighting skills than cultural anthropology. Rocket is archaeology because material culture. Also sometimes he does cultural survey work with Groot. Drax represents bioanth because the guys is super-effective but sometimes you’re like: dude, get up out of the weeds. Some things are social constructs. TO me, Drax seems like the kind of guy who doesn’t understand why you didn’t include a p-value in your abstract.

But I could be wrong. How do you think that metaphor works out?

Fads at the Margins

The hipster community can offer refreshing and insightful critiques (or even rejection) of “popular” or “mainstream” contemporary trends, whether it be in lifestyle, fashion or social conventions. As a whole, anthropologists do the same when it comes to theoretical formulations. We interrogate tacit assumptions about the world around us and even turn them on their heads entirely. We don’t simply accept that which has come before us, but we question and reimagine it in ways that yield complex ideas; students in my own classes have shared their intellectual struggles with excitement for their first encounters with anthropological literature. We turn to the old, the obscure and the unknown to find alternative understandings; we deconstruct the past and present, refine and reimagine what we thought we knew, and make the old new again. Such nuanced understanding requires making extremely fine distinctions about various concepts. Such work is deeply productive.

However, the ability to make extremely fine intellectual distinctions among various phenomena is precisely what makes us opaque and irrelevant to the general public; it is what the new student to anthropology struggles with. The hipster may claim that band X produces music wildly superior to band Y in every way, while the general public has never heard of either one of them, and cannot distinguish the sound of one from the other. Like the hipster, the scholar is accused of getting held up in endless squabbles about extremely fine distinctions, and thus scholarship can be seen not only as a meaningful dialogue but as a way to demarcate membership in an elite group. And as soon as non-hipsters have heard of band X it is no longer superior to band Y. Discovering powerful theoretical lenses (the equivalent of the next great band or fashion) produces cultural capital for anthropologists, and can help establish a career – but jumping on the bandwagon too late can be labeled cheap opportunism. Worry not, future anthropologists, a new French social theorist is always waiting to be discovered.

Although critique of the mainstream can encourage a rich intellectual dialogue, it can also produce an intellectual snobbery or elitism. I have seen doctoral students who are deeply sensitive to raced and classed elitism shun and ostracize a peer because her/his position was too “mainstream” or framework too dated. Furthermore, any attempt to make that dialogue meaningful to the general public is dismissed as irrelevant (for one’s career) and intellectually stultifying. Despite some movement towards better including applied and public anthropologists at the table, the discipline is still deeply rooted in theory and intellectual fads. This can be frustrating.

Can there be an anthropologist-public intellectual?

Many anthropologists love to ‘hate on’ biologist and professor of geography Jared Diamond¹. He writes popular, mainstream books that seemingly re-package antiquated, geographically deterministic, grand theories of human societies that anthropologists discarded as inadequate years ago. At their worst, his writings seem to alleviate White, Western guilt about colonial conquest by pointing to massive, impersonal social forces that are the ‘true culprit’ of current global inequities. However, his works also align with much of the core messaging of anthropology: that socio-political structures, the distribution of resources, historical conditions and geography can be as powerful as agency in shaping the current state of affairs. I agree with a number of the substantive critiques of Diamond, but the accessible texts can lay a strong foundation upon which further conversations can productively be built. Diamond’s books are also fun to read and accessible.

Therefore, although the critiques of Diamond’s work is substantive, it seems to me that what most offends some anthropologists is not his intellectual argument, but rather that Diamond is poaching on anthropology’s territory – that he is taking old anthropological fads to the mainstream. I hear the same fury about non-anthropologists who ‘do ethnography’ or ‘culture.’ The critiques sound much like hipsters who see their own styles go mainstream, or are experts on the obscure:

That ironic Metallica t-shirt is so 2012.

Grizzly Bear is just a pale shadow of Neutral Milk Hotel.

The fury seems partly rooted in our own marginalized position, and the lack of acknowledgment of our own expertise. Why, we wonder, are they listening to these others? Why can’t people see that what we do is so much better than what they do?

Similar to hipsters, anthropologists can be slave to an endless array of fads. Although these academic fads can be intellectually stimulating, we also use this knowledge to demarcate membership, maintain our relevance and evaluate one another – which is a major aspect of doctoral study. As a doctoral student, one learns to articulate personal narratives related to the in-group (anthropologists), but may simultaneously act to make oneself indecipherable to out-groups (everyone else). Furthermore, it seems as if the act of making something accessible to the mainstream is considered one of “selling out.” Thus we frequently complain that no one listens to us, while making our work impenetrable to non-experts and punishing those who attempt to makes those works more accessible. I have heard many call for anthropologists to produce a new public intellectual in the tradition of Margaret Mead, but it seems that the culture of anthropology today is designed to position us at the margins.

The question is in the ‘seems.’ Do we position ourselves at the margins or is there something else at work? Can anthropologists produce public intellectuals given how we socialize students into the discipline? Is it a contradiction of terms, like a “mainstream” hipster? Given our media-bite culture, is it possible to have true public intellectuals at all? Which current anthropologists and anthropological works do you think have been most successful at crossing over into engagement with the public? I invite comment below.

Other posts in the series:

• Part I: What is a Hipster?
• Part III: The Anthropological Brand
• Part IV: Authenticity and Privilege
• Part V: Why do they Hate Us?

I am an anthropologist. Four simple words, but they capture a complex process of becoming that was hardly simple. Despite the very human desire to impose order on chaos, the processes through which people become acquired by such categories are usually quite complex. Like many anthropologists, I’ve done my share of navel-gazing – reflecting both on the role I’ve come to inhabit and the process through which I’ve come to inhabit it.

I am not a hipster – at least, I do not think I am. This is not entirely helpful as most hipsters I have met don’t think of themselves as hipsters either. Nonetheless, the parallels between anthropologists and hipsters have been on my mind. My observations are frankly exacerbated by my appointment in a School for Education, where my anthropological roots make me (at least in my own head) something of a “cool” kid. In contrast, in anthropological circles, my ties to education mark me as “uncool.” My present position in the structure as permanent and non-tenure further marginalizes me in any academic circle, pushing me to a periphery which some consider beneath notice at all. Can looking at the hipster tell us something about the anthropologist and the academy, I wonder? These observations about the social tension (and structural food chain) within academia naturally presuppose other critical questions: what precisely is a “hipster” and does it actually exist as a meaningful category?

Later on in this series, I unpack particular parallels of interest.  I hope that I do so in a way that is valuable for thinking through the discipline and the challenges we face.  Particular emphasis will include:

• Part II: Critiques from the Margins
• Part III: The Anthropological Brand
• Part IV: Authenticity and Privilege
• Part V: Why Do They Hate Us?

Savage Minds has been kind enough to allow me a space to publicly untangle these thoughts. I hope that I contribute here to an ongoing dialogue about scholarly subjectivities in anthropology vis-à-vis the cultural trope of the contemporary, urban “hipster.” These posts are therefore a reflection on the process through which we “become” anthropologists and the broader implications for the discipline. On the other hand these posts are also a cheeky, rambling commentary on my own personal anecdotes and observations. As these posts are partly an enactment of scholarly mimesis, I beg the readers’ patience in enduring yet another navel-gazing piece about anthropologists, although my hope is you will find this a productive one. But where to begin?

What is the hipster?

As I am writing this blog series for the Internet, to an audience of anthropologists (or those so inclined), the asking of this question is almost absurd. I can presume that the majority of readers of the Savage Minds blog are themselves either hipsters (in denial) or move in the same circle as hipsters. Certainly I would apply the label to many persons that I associate with, although I do not intend this as an epithet as is often the case. The “hipster” category has seemingly become one that many people put on others but only rarely take upon themselves. In this first post of the series I attempt to think through what I mean by the term “hipster,” or some such meanings, as there does not seem to be consensus on what a hipster is.

Like any good academic, I need to start with definitions, and so I first turned to the reigning usage expert on such cultural fads, tropes and archetypes: Urbandictionary.com. If you are unfamiliar with it, this website runs through user-generated definitions of slang, malapropisms and other colloquialisms where users can vote for the “best” definitions; in the tradition of web 2.0, one may think of it as a democratic dictionary of slang. The most “liked” hipster definition on the site is a long treatise on the hipster, which can be found here. A few highlights for me include:

hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20’s and 30’s that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter.

And:

It is part of the hipster central dogma not to be influenced by mainstream advertising and media, which tends to only promote ethnocentric ideals of beauty

And finally:

Anti-hipster sentiment often comes from people who simply can’t keep up with social change and are envious of those who can.

Ahh, the marvels of the Internet: where even definitions can feel defensive and persecuted. Although this anonymous author (and I) don’t think of the label in undesirable terms, I have found ‘hipster’ most often used as an epithet even among those individuals who on the surface appear to be hipsters to my apparently untrained eye. Nonetheless, the second most popular definition completely subverts the first, which I quote it in its entirety:

Definitions are too mainstream.

This second definition is tongue-in-cheek and dismissive. These two definitions show the full range of the ‘hipster’ in popular discourse. Reams of Internet memes, comics, blog-posts and hashtags abound with hipster images of carefully manicured facial hair (sometimes manicured to appear un-manicured), thick glasses, flannel, and vaguely distant looks that give the appearance of being stoned. Stereotypes and blog posts, however, do not an analysis make.

Definitely (not?) a Sub/Counter Culture

The academy does not have a lot to say about the current iteration of hipsters. On the whole, those who do have something to say fall into one of two camps ¹. The first camp seemingly aligns with the first definition above in thinking about the hipster movement as being a sub- or counter-culture. Of course, as identity in capitalist spaces is so dependent on consumptive practices, it is through product consumption that a hipster identity becomes most visible. Accordingly, the hipster population is one which rejects mainstream, capitalist and individualist norms in favor of tactile crafts, free-trade coffee and styles that physically mark that rejection. Wes Shumar ², for example, sees these as the direct descendants of both the 1940’s hipster, and the hippie movements of the 60’s and 70’s. The focus on non-corporate produced crafts, he argues, is refreshing in that market exchange values are not the primary way that hipsters think about the world and their activity. Rob Horning ³ has suggested that hipsters are the producers of new forms of cultural capital, explorers and diviners of consumable coolness to be delivered as products to the mainstream and abandoned when it is adopted by them. He wonders if the hipster is a unique historical aberration, or a permanent, unwitting middleman between the dominant and the dominated. The unique space may shape a unique way of seeing.

Scholars in the second camp interested in the hipster are somewhat skeptical about or dismissive of the hipster movement as being a sub- or counter-culture at all. Reid Pillifant ⁴ wonders how unique hipsters are at all, or if they are just people who happen to be young and funny looking, and living in particular neighborhoods. Meanwhile, Mark Greif ⁵  argues that the hipster is not a counter-culture, sensitive, rebellious intellectual, but rather a disaffected, suburban White transplant into a gentrifying urban center; even the main agent of gentrification. He argues that hipsters are voracious consumers of a style that is constantly shifting desirability in order to promote endless consumption. A hidden shop selling vintage clothing is popular for a short time before it is made irrelevant the next day. They have turned consumption itself into an art, where the fine distinction of this hat over that invests cultural capital, and where although it is used and battered, it can be sold for four times the value of a new hat. As the “illegitimate children of Andy Warhol,” Dana Tortorici ⁶ claims they want to embody nostalgia, irony, sexy authenticity, tactile souvenirs, and such. However, they are not the artist that Warhol was; they are in the ultra-cool entourage that builds careers around and profits from the artist.

Christian Lorentzen ⁷ has called them the 21st century “yuppie” and “fraud” – suggesting that they are a generation of suburban white kids “slumming” it with working class and ethnic communities in their youth before returning to traditional patterns of white middle class life. They hide behind “irony” to alleviate their racist and sexist commentary, and seek authenticity in their childhoods. Along similar lines, Patrice Evans ⁸ sees the hipster lifestyle as an indulgence . . . as a White, middle-class luxury to sleep through the early years of young adulthood when many real working class and minority individuals are struggling to find some shell of security. She suggests that the term is meaningless within Black communities, where a hipster is indistinguishable from any other affluent, privileged, White person.

Anti-commercial rebel or consumer par-excellence? Post-racial individualist or White, affluent apologist? Like any construct, trope or archetype there are many layers of complexity here. There is no breathing, quintessential hipster as there is no perfect distillation of Blackness or the Republican Party or anthropology – there are only living, complex people living nuanced lives in and around a social landscape that is ever changing. In fact, the hipster may subsume all of these things, contradictions, paradoxes and tensions included. The hipster is an emerging and shifting cultural trope, and I would hardly lay claim to it as my main area of expertise. In fact, the focus of this blog series is not the hipster, but the anthropologist. I imagine that, given the above, many of you have already begun to think through the parallels I have in mind. At this point, however, I would invite others to point to other resources (popular or academic) in the comments section below for those interested in the hipster as an object of academic inquiry.

Regardless, this first post lays out my understanding of and interest in the nuanced and paradoxical subjectivities which we all inhabit. In the next post, I begin to lay out some of the hipsterish parallels.

UPDATE: Edited to include overview.

In this post, I’ll consider the 2012 phenomenon in relation to time and otherness. Naturally, I’m hedging my bets and posting this before the potential end of the world. Although no one can seem to decide when the Maya are, they appear to be sometime between Aug 11, 3114 BC and Dec 21, 2012 AD.

This time frame has less to do with the Maya themselves than with how they are invoked by Westerners (both believers and debunkers). I realize that “West” and “Westerners” — just like “the Maya” —  is an overambitious gloss, but indulge me for a moment.  For the record, my perspective is based largely on the American, British, and Spanish public spheres in the press and internet.  (While there seems to be 2012 interest in Russia and China, I’m not in a position to comment on that in any detail. Please leave a comment if you can.)

In the rhetoric of the West, “the Maya” appear to take quantum leaps between historical moments.  In my previous post I focused on the “otherness” of U.S. spiritualists in the eyes of apocalypse debunkers. It goes without saying that the Maya are also “other” in ways that anthropologists have long objected to.  The precise relationships between The Maya (abstract) and the Maya (ethnographic, historic) is a matter of debate, but regardless they are invoked constantly when it comes to apocalyptic expectations for 2012.  

For some in the West, the Maya — along with many others — are a “People Without History.” Eric Wolf used this ironic title for his book because he wanted to emphasize just the opposite; all peoples do have history, even though Western societies often fail to see that or actively ignore the fact. This pattern holds when it comes to supposed Mayan prophecies.  Some believe that the ancient Maya were trying to tell us something, as if all those intervening centuries of history didn’t exist, and then performed an improbable Mayan Vanishing Act at the end of Classic period.

And it’s not just the Maya who are said to speak to us from the deep past before conveniently “disappearing.” Prophecies of apocalypse are not rare in western societies, and most are legitimated on the basis of ancient texts (the Bible, I Ching, Nostradamus, etc). The temporal and cultural distance between those believed to be predicting the apocalypse and those waiting to experience it is precisely what legitimates the prediction. (In other cases that distance is created by technology, such as with Y2K. I’ll leave those parallels  for another time.) Many scholars respond to this by insisting that we must consider Classic Maya texts in their historical and cultural context, and they are absolutely right.

But if we stop here, we miss some of the contradictions  that emerge in arguments about when the Maya are. Despite claims to historical specificity when it comes to interpreting Classic period stela, many debunkers invoke contemporary Maya to convince believers that Dec 21, 2012 will be a non-event. If arguments about stela translations or astronomical observations do not convince you, they imply, then at least you will agree that if the Maya are not worried then you should not be either.

The Penn Museum “Lords of Time” exhibit, for example, employs this method. After multiple rooms of careful and convincing analysis of Classic stela and archaeological evidence, the exhibit leads to a corridor with multiple video screens. Each is dedicated to a different Maya individual, identified by name, ethnic group, and profession. The viewer can choose to hear their answers to one of several questions, including about 2012. None of these individuals believe that the world is about to end.

Other scholars, such as Johan Normark, echo this.  Such claims about non-believing Maya have also appeared in newspaper accounts (see examples in Slate, National Geographic, International Business Times, among others.)

This move is effective on multiple levels.  It re-positions the Maya as our contemporaries, rather than as “vanished” others.  They become People With Histories, both collective and individual, who can comment directly on their own cultural texts. It acknowledges Maya-speakers as having a long historical presence spanning from before the construction of Palenque to after the Guatemalan Civil War.  It invites their opinions on what might happen on Friday.

But there are contradictions here, too. Calling on contemporary Maya to debunk beliefs legitimated by invoking the ancient Maya relies on forging a temporal connection between the two. It suggests that contemporary Maya should be able to interpret the meanings of Classic Maya despite the centuries of colonialism, cultural change, and historical events that separate them.

This might be seen as a deliberate and strategic move meant precisely to address the beliefs of those who see the Maya as timeless. Certainly it is not because scholars are naive about these issues. Anthropologists are well aware of the dangers of assuming unbroken cultural continuity. While there are certainly links between the past and the present, these are not unmediated by current realities.

Ironically, some western spiritualists emphasize cultural discontinuity to suggest why contemporary Maya might be less aware of ancient Maya wisdom than themselves (which is its own kind of arrogance).  They point to the same historical ruptures that anthropologists do: the Conquest, the massive demographic declines of the 15th and 16th centuries caused by disease, and colonialism. They simultaneously suggest that the ancient Maya may have been predicting events thousands of years in their future, while the contemporary Maya are unaware of that.

What is at stake in these arguments by both believers and debunkers is which Maya — past or present — can legitimately speak for the Maya as a whole in the eyes of Western interlocutors.  In either case — whether we believe that contemporary Maya have a privileged knowledge of their ancestors beliefs, or whether we posit that ancient Maya had important messages for the contemporary world — the Maya are made into a single group that transcends time.

Humor me for a moment while I compare this situation to another western cultural phenomenon that uses the title “Lords of Time”: Doctor Who. I think there is something here about how westerners think about time, and what it means to dominate it.  (This also allows me to follow in the established western tradition of bringing the Maya into science fiction.)

What makes Doctor Who a Time Lord? He cannot control time; time continues moving just as it would without him (season finales aside). He is a Time Lord because he is not bound by time. With his ship the TARDIS, he can jump between places and times, interacting briefly with those spaces before moving on. (Interestingly, he usually moves both temporally and spatially at once.) Within each moment he is bound by conventional understandings of time: time moves forward, and he with it. He does not appear to experience time differently from those around him, although he sees temporal possibilities hidden from others. He just has the option of leaving (so long as there are no Daleks in the way).

This may seem like a digression, but I do not think it coincidental that the Maya have also been termed “Lords of Time.” Like Doctor Who, The Maya — as invoked by the 2012 phenomena — are not bound by time.   In western rhetoric, they make quantum leaps between historical moments and spaces. They are both timeless and historically grounded. They link times and places: Classic Guatemalan stela with Chichen Itza tourism, pre-Columbian texts with Jose Arguelles, and ancient rituals with contemporary fears about climate change.

Being a “Lord of Time” involves space as well as time, technology as well as tradition, and connection as well as alterity.  But most importantly, this says far more about how those in the West view time and what it means to dominate it.

There are opportunities in the apocalypse.  The end of the world has been commodified.  A few are seriously investing in bunkers, boats, and survival supplies. Tourism is up, not only to Mayan archaeological sites, but also to places like Bugarach, France and Mt. Rtanj, Serbia.  But even those of us on a budget can afford at least a book, a T-shirt or a handbag.

There are opportunities here for academics, too. Many scholars have been quoted in the press lately saying that nothing will happen on Dec 21 , in addition to those who have written comprehensive books and articles discrediting the impending doom. Obviously publishing helps individual careers, and that does not detract from our collective responsibility to debunk ideas that might lead people to physical or financial harm.  But neither can we divorce our work from its larger social implications.

It is telling that the main scholarly players in debunking the Mayan Apocalypse in the U.S. are NASA (which is facing budget cuts) and anthropologists.  Both groups feel the need to prove they are relevant because our collective jobs depend on it. I don’t need to go into great detail with this crowd about academia’s current situation. Academia has gone from being a well-respected, stable job to one where most classes are taught by underpaid, uninsured part-time adjuncts, and many Ph.D.s never find work in academia at all. Tuition fees for undergraduates have skyrocketed while full-time faculty salaries have stagnated.

Among the public (too often talked about as being in “the real world,” as if academics were somehow immune to taxes or swine flu), there seems to be a general distrust of intellectuals. That, combined with the current economic situation, has translated into a loss of research funding, such as cuts to the Fulbright program and NSF. Some public officials specifically state that science and engineering are worth funding, but anthropology is not.  To add insult to injury, the University of California wants to move away from that whole “reading” thing and rebrand itself as a web startup.

Articles, books with general readership, being quoted in the newspaper, and yes, blogging are all concrete ways to show funding agencies and review committees that what we do matters. The way to get exposure among those general audiences is to engage with what interests them — like the end of the world.  Dec. 21, 2012 has become an internet meme. Many online references to it are debunkings or tongue-in-cheek. Newspaper articles on unrelated topics make passing references in jest, stores offer just-in-case-it’s-real sales, people are planning parties.  There seems to be more written to discredit the apocalypse, or make fun on it, than to prepare for it.

We need to remember that this non-believer attention has a purpose, and that purpose is not just (or even primarily) about convincing believers that nothing is going to happen. Rather, it serves to demonstrate something about non-believers themselves.  “We” are sensible and logical, while “they” are superstitious and credulous. “We” value science and data, while “they” turn to astrology, misreadings of ancient texts, and esoteric spirituality.   “We” remember the non-apocalypses of the past, while “they” have forgotten.

I would argue that discrediting the Mayan Apocalypse is part of an ongoing process of creating western modernity (cue Latour). That modernity requires an “other,” and here that “other” is defined in this case primarily by religious/spiritual belief in the Mayan apocalypse.  The more “other” these Apocalypse believers are, the more clearly they reflect the modernity of non-believers.  (Of course, there are also the “others” of the Maya themselves, and I’ll address that issue in my next post.)

This returns us to the difference I drew in my first post between “Transitional Apocalyptic Expectations” (TAE) and “Catastrophic Apocalyptic Expectations” (CAE).  I suspect the majority of believers are expecting something like a TAE-type event, but media attention focuses on discrediting CAE beliefs, such as a rogue planet hitting the Earth or massive floods. These would be dire catastrophes, but they will also be far easier to disprove. We will all notice if a planet does or does not hit the Earth next week, but many of us — myself included — will miss a transformation in human consciousness among the enlightened.

By providing the (very real) scientific data to discredit the apocalypse, scholars are incorporated into this project of modernity.  Much of the scholarly work on this phenomenon is fascinating and subtle, but the press picks up on two main themes.  One is scientific proof that the apocalypse will not happen, such as astronomical data that Earth is not on a collision course with another planet, Mayan epigraphy that shows the Long Count does not really end, and ethnography that suggests most Maya themselves are not worried about any of this.  The other scholarly theme the press circulates is the long history of apocalyptic beliefs in the west.  In the logic of the metanarrative of western progress, this connects contemporary Apocalypse believers to the past, nonmodernity and “otherness.”

I now find myself in an uncomfortable position, although it is an intellectually interesting corner to be backed into. I agree with my colleagues that the world will not end, that Mayan ideas have been misappropriated, and that we have a responsibility to address public concerns.  At the same time, I can’t help but feel we are being drawn, either reluctantly or willingly, into a larger project than extends far beyond next week.

Last summer, I traveled to Philadelphia to visit the Penn Museum exhibit “Maya: the Lords of Time.” It was, as one might expect given the museum collection and the scholars involved, fantastic.  I want to comment on just the beginning of the exhibit, however. On entering, one is immediately greeted by a wall crowded with TV screens, all showing different clips of predicted disasters and people talking fearfully about the end of the world. The destruction, paranoia, and cacophony create a ambiance of chaos and uncertainty. Turning the corner, these images are replaced by widely spaced Mayan artifacts and stela. The effect is striking.  One moves from media-induced insanity to serenity, from endless disturbing jump-cuts to the well-lit, quiet contemplation of beautiful art.

Among these images were scenes from Director Roland Emmerich’s blockbuster film 2012 (2009). This over-the-top disaster film is well used in that context.  Still, it is interesting how often 2012 is mentioned by academics and other debunkers — almost as often as they mention serious alternative thinkers about the Mayan calendar, such as Jose Arguelles (although the film receives less in-depth coverage than he does).

I find this interesting because 2012 is clearly not trying to convince us to stockpile canned goods or build boats to prepare for the end of the Maya Long Count, any more than Emmerich’s previous films were meant to prepare us for alien invasion (Independence Day, 1996) or the effects of global climate change (The Day After Tomorrow, 2004).  Like Emmerich’s previous films, 2012 is a chance to watch the urban industrialized world burn (in that way, it has much in common with the currently popular zombie film genre). If you want to see John Cusack survive increasingly implausible crumbling urban landscapes, this film is for you.

The Maya, however, are barely mentioned in 2012. There are no Mayan characters, no one travels to Mesoamerica, there is no mention of the Long Count.  Emmerich’s goal for 2012 was, in his own words (here and here), “a modern retelling of Noah’s Ark.” In fact, he claims that the movie originally had nothing to do with the 2012 phenomenon at all.  Instead, he was convinced – reluctantly – to include the concept because of public interest in the Maya calendar.

This explains why the Maya only receive two passing mentions in 2012 — one is a brief comment that even “they” had been able to predict the end of the world, the other a short news report on a cult suicide in Tikal. The marketing aspect of the film emphasized these Maya themes (all of the film footage about the Maya is in the trailer, the movie website starts with a rotating image of the Maya calendar, and there are related extras on the DVD), but the movie itself had basically nothing to do with the Maya, the Mayan Long Count, or Dec 21.

Nevertheless, this film’s impact on public interest in Dec 21 is measurable.  Google Trends, which gives data on the number of times particular search terms are used, gives us a sense of the impact of this $200,000,000  film. I looked at a number of related terms, but have picked the ones that show the general pattern: There is a spike of interest in 2012 apocalyptic ideas when the 2012 marketing campaign starts (November 2008), a huge spike when the film is released (November 2009), and a higher baseline of interest from then until now. Since January, interest in the Mayan calendar/apocalypse has been steadily climbing (and in fact, is higher every time I check this link; it automatically updates). In other words, the 2012 movie both responded to, and reinforced, public interest in the 2012 phenomenon.

Here I return to Michael D. Gordin’s The Pseudoscience Wars (2012).  This delightful book deals with the scientific response to Velikovsky, who believed that the miracles of the Old Testament and other ancient myths documented the emergence of a comet from Jupiter, its traumatic interactions with Earth, and its eventual settling into the role of the planet Venus. (The final chapter also discusses the 2012 situation.)  Gordin’s main focus is understanding why Velikovsky — unlike others labeled “crackpots” before him — stirred the public ire of astronomers and physicists. Academics’ real concern was not Velikovsky’s ideas per se, but how much attention he received by being published by MacMillan — a major publisher of science textbooks — which implied the book had scientific legitimacy. Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision” was a major bestseller when it was released in 1950, and academics felt the ideas had to be addressed so that the public would not be misled.

With the Mayan Apocalypse, no major academic publisher is lending legitimacy to these theories.   Books about expected events of 2012 (mainly TAE ideas) are published by specialty presses that focus on the spiritual counterculture, such as Evolver Editions, Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, Shambhala, and John Hunt Publishing.  Instead, film media has become the battleground for public attention (perhaps because reading is declining?). The immense amount of money put into movies, documentaries, and TV shows about the Mayan Apocalypse is creating public interest today, and in some ways this parallels what Macmillan did for Velikovsky in the 1950s.

One example of this is the viral marketing campaign for 2012 conducted in November 2008.   Columbia pictures created webpages that were not clearly marked as advertising (these no longer appear to be available), promoting the idea that scientists really did know the world would end and were preparing.  This type of advertising was not unique to this film, but in this case it reinforced already existing fears that the end really was nigh.  NASA began responding to public fears about 2012 as a result of this marketing campaign, and many of the academics interested in addressing these concerns also published after this time.

Academics are caught in something of a bind here.  Do we respond to public fears, in the hopes of debunking them, but no doubt also increasing the public interest in the very ideas we wish to discredit?  Should we respond in the hopes of selling a few more books or receiving a few more citations, thus generating interest in the rest of what our discipline does?  As anthropologists we are not immune to the desires of public interest, certainly (obviously I’m not — here I am, blogging away), nor should we be.  Perhaps something good can come of the non-end-of-the-world.  I’ll turn to this question next time.

As an aside I will say this about Graeber’s essay: he uses Roman numerals to demarcate thematic chunks of the essay, which allows him to write without transitions. Whenever I see this technique it always makes me think of Walter Benjamin, that patron saint of the Marxist critique of pop culture. To invoke Benjamin in an essay on Batman is like saying, “I’m very serious about playing around here.” Or, at least that’s what I’m thinking when I write essays with Roman numerals.

I.
Graeber’s subject is Christopher Nolan’s series of Batman movies, which are themselves based on Frank Miller’s legendary characterization of the hero in “The Dark Knight Returns” (1986), widely considered one of the greatest comic book stories of all time (and rightfully so). Miller’s book closed the door on the Silver Age version of the character and redefined the Gotham City universe as gritty and violent. Among the movie going public Miller is also known as the original author of Sin City and 300, while to the comics crowd he’s associated with legendary runs at Daredevil and Wolverine.

Miller himself is a reactionary ass and his slander of the Occupy movement as composed of “louts, thieves, and rapists” was only the latest salvo in a stream of proto-fascist dribble. So when Graeber pins down the The Dark Knight Rises as “anti-Occupy propaganda” he is pretty much on the money. A more patient man than I could probably connect the dots between the Reagan-era conservatism of “Returns” with Rises. Neoliberalism and the apocalypse, maybe. Revenge, definitely.

What are superhero movies all about? And why are they so popular right now? These are the questions that prompted me to think about how anthropology could actually forward such a project. How ought we compose a research agenda focused on mass media and popular culture? Personally, I find myself consistently disappointed in most everything academics have written about pop culture. I’d like to think that anthropology could do better. What Graeber is doing here is using history and critical theory to write a polemic in order to make a political point. That’s fine, but it’s only one way that anthropology might go about designing research about comic book super heroes.

What could potentially make an anthropology of pop culture difficult is method. How, exactly, do you use ethnography to study it? There are a few entry points that could be alternatives to/ supplements for a theory-based cultural critique and they revolve around production and consumption.

Some ideas–

Production. Objective: study the “backstage” process from creative talents to publishing and distribution. To be sure there is a difference in scale between the indies and the major labels but it all starts with a creative person or team having an idea. Role-model: “Latinos, Inc.” by Davila – the author conducts an ethnography of New York advertizing agencies focusing on how they imagine, study, interact with, and represent Hispanic markets through highly orchestrated advertising campaigns.

Consumption. Objective: learn what pop culture means to the people who love it. We call the cultural practice of consuming a comic book “reading” and it is basically a private experience. You sit still, hold the book in your hands, and interpret what you see. Using your imagination you are transported into a fictional world. However, the majority of readers share their love for the genre with others. In this way you experience pleasure twice: once in private by reading and once in public by being a fan. Role-model: “Reading the Romance” by Radway – the author uses ethnography to investigate why romance novels are so popular among women and what is really happening when people read by studying a book club and the bookstore the club members frequent.

Consumption as production. Objective: investigate the performance of fandom through the creative re-appropriation of established characters. Internet culture has made more visible the tendency of fans to use beloved characters and themes as templates for their own creations and self-expressions including cosplay, fanfic, animated GIFs, remix and mash-up just to scratch the surface. Is increased visibility making this form of fandom increasingly popular? Role-model: “Textual Poachers” by Jenkins – author uses theory from De Certeau to talk about how sci-fi and fantasy fans engage in self-expression by embezzling bits and pieces from their favorite universes and re-presenting them in various forms.

Ethnography as pop culture. Objective: use whatever genre of pop you are interested in as the mode of communication with your readership. Anthropology in particular seems to struggle in communicating its findings to the wider public. Appropriating popular genres could be one model for reimagining ethnography is especially well suited for the study of pop culture. Role model: “Shane, the Lone Ethnographer” by Galman – the author uses the comic book format in place of conventional text to communicate introductory ethnographic topics to readers.

II.
There are two vulnerabilities to the academic study of popular culture that are (possibly?) unique to this particular topic. One – few academics can hope to match the total genre mastery of superfans and thus leave themselves open to critique for “not getting it” on a very basic level. Two – pop culture is by definition ephemeral and dominated by fads, likewise the academic critique of pop culture does not age well; whatever hot topic you write about today will quickly fall out of fashion.

Back in Graeber’s secret lair, he’s moving into a critique of super hero movies. But first he opts to look at comic books themselves and this is where things start to get Freudian. Citing Eco, the author notes that comics share with dreams an obsession with repetition.

The plot is almost always some approximation of the following: a bad guy, maybe a crime boss, more often a powerful supervillain, embarks on a project of world conquest, destruction, theft, extortion, or revenge. The hero is alerted to the danger and figures out what’s happening. After trials and dilemmas, at the last possible minute the hero foils the villain’s plans. The world is returned to normal until the next episode when exactly the same thing happens once again.

Here we might observe that, as per my methodological discussion above, anthropology is better suited to studying people than plots. Maybe it’s my closeted structuralism, but in anthropological studies of narrative forms the plot is, sometimes, beside the point. What narratives mean to the people who use them and traffic in their symbolism is a far more interesting set of questions.

Graeber does go on to make a keen observation that I have not heard in comics circles before: whereas villains are constantly engaged in some creative project or another, the hero only ever reacts and seldom engages in such projects of their own. This really speaks to me on an intuitive level and I think it might pan out to be true if we inventoried a representative sample of universes. Just consider Ozymandias from “The Watchman” (1987), a hero who becomes a villain once he takes on a world changing project!

While I’m sympathetic to Graeber’s leftist political project, his essay also highlights the difficulties of using theory to navigate the realms of pop culture. While the author moves to suture consuming comic books and consuming movies it’s still apples and oranges to me. Status in comic book fandom, like jazz or baseball fandom, is measured out by the accumulation of esoteric factoids and errata (perhaps demonstrating that level of mastery is part of the appeal). But even I can tell you this:

Batman on the page and Batman on the big screen are fundamentally not the same person.

This conflation of book and movie is driven home by the art, presumably chosen by the design staff at The New Inquiry, to accompany the essay. The addition of vintage comic book covers makes the essay more appealing visually and some of them are supremely evocative of the author’s subject, as with the first one which features Lex Luther dreaming of Superman. But comic book superheroes reside in complex universes, the knowledge of which fans covet and use to authenticate their prestige. There are canons, alternate universes, spin-offs, and endless debate about which is the proper heading for any given story. Let’s not even get started on the “What if…” series.

The result is often a self-contradictory mess. Just check out this brief synopsis of Bane, the villain from The Dark Knight Rises. When a movie director goes to translate this mess to the screen the result is like that diagram in Latour’s “We Have Never Been Modern”: in the realm of the real there is a tangle of meaning, but modernity only ever allows us to represent it to ourselves as order. The result is we think we have created progress when in reality we have not, this is why Nolan’s was an impossible task.

So all the Freud and the lesson on how law is based on violence leads to this: the superhero needs the villain just as the cop needs the criminal. Without villains we’d have no need for heroes. Superheroes themselves aren’t fascists, Graeber writes, “They are just ordinary, decent, super-powerful people who inhabit a world in which fascism is the only political possibility.”

This is not the ordinary way of looking at superheroes. Just as easily one could have used Freud to read the dream of comic books as wish fulfillment. The reader (likely a boy) holds an ambiguous social status: privileged because he is male, disempowered because he is not an adult. The superhero then offers a child’s fantasy of what the adult world is like. To the boy his parents are both hero and villain. Their knowledge is plainly superior to his and their power over his world seemingly limitless.

It’s also a supremely dissatisfying conclusion to a Batman fan because it gets the genre “wrong” much as Nolan gets the character of Bane “wrong” – at least according to the high standards set by SMOF. And while the politics of “Rises” and Nolan’s Batman are hot today, in a few years nobody will care about them. I mean, have you read Lawrence Grossberg’s essays on rock music? No. The kids don’t listen to rock anymore anyways.

So kudos to Graeber for attempting a critical reading of Batman in light of Occupy. But its not clobberin’ time quite yet. If anthropology wants to do something with pop culture other than interpret it with critical theory, then how the hell are we going to do it? And can we do in a way that sucks less than Cultural Studies?

In my last post, I defined a museum as “a social institution where knowledge is communicated through the display of objects.” I then spent quite a bit of time dealing with the implications and ramifications of the word “objects”. But there’s another important part of that definition, one which opens up a significantly different view of what a museum is, and that’s the part about a museum being a “social institution”.

Objects can be displayed in a lot of contexts. I have a bunch of artworks by local Las Vegas artists displayed throughout my home — but that doesn’t make my home a museum of Las Vegas art. Lots of people put together collections of images on Pinterest that communicate knowledge about themselves or topics that interest them, but Pinterest isn’t a museum either.

What makes a museum a museum is that it’s social, and that it’s an institution. As a social phenomenon, a museum is a point of connection for a community of visitors, researchers, curators and other staff, and even subjects. And as an institution, that connection, that web of social relationships, is a structured one. 

It’s hard to put a finger on just what that structure is, though I think I hinted at it somewhat when I described museums as generating their own aura, producing in visitors a museum habitus that regulates their interaction with the museum. The relationship a museum has with its audience, consultants, donors, staff, and volunteers is structured by a wide variety of social forces: the cultural capital of the organization (and of its audiences), legal regulation, notions of academic integrity, class relationships, and so on. These forces combine to shape a community, and a community is what transforms hodge-podge of objects, architecture (physical or informational), staff, and audience into a museum.

Or rather, community is the museum.

In part this is because museums are in constant communication with an audience. And in part, this is because museums, like other nonprofits, rely on charitable giving and volunteer labor to survive. So a museum is literally a collection of donors, sponsors, and volunteers, and where paid staff is involved at least part of their job is relating to this community.

But I want to go a little further and place the museum and its staff not so much “in relation” to their community of benefactors of various stripes, but “as part of” that community. A museum exists as a focal point of a self-selected community of people who relate to others within that community in various ways.

The “museum as community” idea is very much reflected in contemporary museum practice. One of the most influential voices in the museum world today is Nina Simon, author of The Participatory Museum, advocate of a sort of museum where planning, exhibition development, and administration are done not for a community but with or even in a community. This kind of approach is reflected in, for example, the “pop-up museum”, where exhibitions are assembled on the spur of the moment by members of the museum community — say, an exhibit on the Korean War created by Korean War veterans out of material that they themselves supply with object labels written by visitors and reflecting not necessarily historical fact but visitors’ individual relationshipw with the objects they encounter.

This is a far cry from the Met’s refusal over the first several decades of its existence to be open evenings or weekends to accommodate working class visitors, or the British Museum’s policy in the late 19th century of requiring visitors prove their qualifications before being allowed to view the collection. (Though to be fair, those museums were also communities, just really, really exclusive ones.)

In this time of changing standards of accessibility and transparency, even collections can be part of the community — as in numerous collections of Native American objects which have opened up their collections to the people represented by the objects in the museum’s possession, so that Indians can rekindle their relationships with the people, spirits, and objects taken from their homes in the past and sealed off during the less-open years of the 20th century.

If museums are communities, then, what can we make of the role of Executive DIrector? Is he or she a steward of the institution on the community’s behalf? A shepherd, drawing together a flock to graze in the cultural fields of his or her exhibition halls? A minister, a boss, a teacher, a cloistered monk? I prefer to think of my role, and of my fellow museum directors’ roles, as that of a community organizer, charged with using the resources at hand to empower others in my community to change their lives. Of course, it flatters me to think of myself this way, but given how I’ve come to think about museums, it seems an apt enough metaphor for what a museum director does.

I have a couple of other things I want to talk about in this series — how an exhibition gets put together, and the issue of who funds museums and why, among some other less-developed ideas — but it seems like a good time to ask if there’s anything others would like to see me explore in this space? I can’t promise I’ll answer everything anyone asks, but I’ll certainly think about it. By now it’s clear that I don’t see myself as a participant-observer in this field; I am pretty much just participating, and whatever observing I do is strictly a reflex of my training. But while I make no pretense towards any kind of objectivity (and, frankly, wouldn’t even if I were doing real fieldwork here — objectivity is for robots and the weak-minded) I will, as much as possible, strive to be honest.

Believe it or not, there is no readily accepted definition of a museum. The American Alliance of Museums officially throws up its hands, stating in its handbook National Standards and Best Practices for U.S. Museums that the term “museum” describes “an organization that people can identify intuitively but that cannot be neatly packaged in a definition,” and continuing on to describe a “big tent” approach, saying that “If an organization considers itself to be a museum, it’s in the tent.”

In other words, we many not be able to define what a museum is, but we know one when we see it.

Sure, there are other definitions of museums, legalistic jargon-laden definitions that serve to define museums in relation to tax codes, property law, fair use protections, and so on, but basically its a reflexive signifier. Museums are museums.

For me, a museum is a social institution where knowledge is communicated through the display of objects. Other things go on in museums — stories are told, texts are offered up, performances are… um, performed, and so on, but unless somewhere in the institution objects are being displayed to communicate knowledge, it’s not a museum. It’s a library, a theater, a performance art space, or something else, but not a museum.

Of course, “objects” is a tricky word. Technically, zoos are considered museums, so objects don’t have to be inanimate. And of course, there’s a long tradition of displaying people in museums, like Minik and his fellow Inuits at the American Museum of Natural History in 1897 and the Yahi Indian Ishi at the Phoebe Hearst Museum in the 1910s. And there’s another hitch: some museums exist solely online, with collections consisting solely of digital files.

Nevertheless, it is the display of stuff that makes a museum a museum. The nature of the stuff isn’t the thing, it’s the act of display, and particularly the act of display in the service of communication. I can tell you about some historical event or personage, I can write a book about it, but until I show you some stuff associated with the event or person (or idea or environment or…), you’re not in a museum. Even if the stuff I show you is just photos or digital scans of photos.

In that sense, there’s something of the Benjaminian aura at work in museums. There’s something we get from an idea embodied in a physical object that’s somehow more satisfying than other forms of representation. And here’s something Benjamin didn’t catch — there are even certain representations that better capture this aura than others. For instance, a photograph of a historical room is somehow more satisfying than a photograph of a reproduction of that room. Maybe if Benjamin had known about photocopiers, he might have had a better metaphor to understand with, he might have seen how a photocopy was better than a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, and thus how the aura of an object dilutes and spreads through its reproductions.

I don’t pretend to understand it completely. All I can say is that people seem to get a thrill out of standing in front of a photograph of a burlesque star that they don’t get seeing the same photograph reproduced in one of the many coffeetable books and other works of burlesque history — even though that photograph on the wall in my museum is almost surely a publicity shot copied hundreds or thousands of times.

Or maybe it’s this: museums make their own auras and lend it to the objects they display. It’s hardly groundbreaking for me to declare that museums take on some of the nature of a place of worship. Voices drop, physical attitudes shift, behavior is subdued when a person walks into a museum; day-to-day habitus is replaced by a sort of reverent awe in the museum, a respectful openness not unlike the way we approach the divine.

Of course, it takes a lot of symbolic work to make a museum function as a museum, and that work can surely fail — but as far as I can tell, the word “museum” itself does a good part of the work before a person ever even enters.

But let me come at this from another angle. Because frankly, for all the romaniticism of the paragraphs above, my working life is hardly romantic at all. The exhbition hall where all that magic takes place is cocooned inside a working organization, a legal entity subject to tax codes, professional standards, budgetary constriants, and so on. If I can get all Weberian up in this post, a functioning museum binds a charismatic side to a routinized, bureaucratic side. Or, to borrow yet another metaphor, this time from the art critic Dave Hickey, museums are equal parts pirate and farmer.

While the museum’s pirate self goes Indiana Jonesing around the world bringing back treasures and tall tales to regale our audiences with, its farmer self — slow-moving, future-oriented, essentially conservative, and always careful not to upset the gods, or for that matter, the pirates — deals with filing the annual list of officers with the state to maintain its corporate standing and preparing 990s for the IRS. Most museums need a collection to continue to exist as museums, but if you have a collection, you also likely have insurance on that collection, and that means getting an appraiser to render the value of everything in your collection to hard dollars and cents. Speaking of insurance, you also need general liability and D&O (Directors and Officers). Are you swooning yet?

Of course, you don’t get to have a collection OR insurance if you don’t have a budget. Museuming consists of a surprising amount of bookkeeping and accounting — and to be honest, keeping track of the collection isn’t all that much different from keeping track of expenses and donor transactions. There is, in short, quite a bit of data entry in the museum world.

And so on. I don’t mean to overplay the quotidian nature of most aspects of museum administration, but to make a point: in most of its operations, a museum is no different from any other nonprofit or, for that matter, from any other corporation. The main difference is that every now and again, instead of designing a new iPhone or creating a new investment package or writing a new software-as-a-service, museum workers organize an exhibition, fundraising event, or educational program.

My museum is tiny. We have about 200 square feet of exhibition space in a downtown Las Vegas arts center. We weren’t always tiny – for 15 years, The Burlesque Hall of Fame existed under the name Exotic World in Helendale, CA, on an old goat ranch. There are several thousand pieces in our collection, and most of it was on display in Helendale; today, only a tiny fraction, maybe half a percent, is on display, with the rest housed in a facility across town, waiting for us to find a suitable new home for the museum.

In that tiny space, I have a permanent exhibition, documenting the history of burlesque in the United States from 1860 to present; a 6′ display case that acts as our gift shop; and about 14′ of wall reserved for temporary exhibits. Currently, we are showing an exhibition about burlesque in Las Vegas, from the ’50s on. I’m working on several other exhibitions to fill that space over the next couple years — one on minorities in burlesque, one on the troubled relationship between burlesque and the law, one on “nerdlesque” (a recent trend of shows celebrating “nerd culture” — Doctor Who, Star Wars, the Joss Whedon oeuvre, comic books, and so on), and a couple other less-developed ideas.

Creating an exhibition is hard. And, as countless theorists have pointed out, fraught with power. Take every critique of ethnographic representation you can think of in the post-Writing Culture world and yep, we’ve got that, too. Fossilizing living culture in the ethnographic present? Check. Using the power of authority to construct representations of others? Check. Imposing narrative or other explanatory devices that may not jibe with the understandings of the people who lived the experiences depicted? Check.

And so on. I try to keep my exhibitions at least partially open to interpretation. I don’t label everything, and I don’t always explain why I put a particular piece where it is. Let them wonder — and supply their own answers. I try to involve my subjects in their own representation. For instance, in a show I put together for our annual Reunion Weekend in June, I invited the Legends (a term that’s taken on its own meaning in the burlesque community, effectively signifying any performer or ex-performer whose career pre-dates the ’90s burlesque revival) to select costumes from their careers to put on display, and I invited the ones who chose to participate to spend time in the exhibition space and talk with visitors.

But mostly, I rely on the nature of the things themselves to mitigate the challenges of representation. I think that’s what the aura is, actually — the power of the thing to speak for itself. It is a matter of resolution: a dress on a mannequin (or better yet, a person, and better still, the person whose dress it is) can be examined minutely, and every stitch, every sequin, every stain tells a story. A photo of that dress eliminates huge chunks of information — not only can you not examine it closely, but you lose the backside, you lose the changing reflections off the sequins as the dress is turned this way and that into the light, you lose the sense of weight and heft of a few yards of cloth dripping with crystals or the lightness of a panel dress crafted from the gauziest of fabrics. The experience of authenticity, then, has to do with the surplus of information presented by the original object, a surplus that is stripped away to greater or lesser degrees by different forms of reproduction.

This, then, is a museum: a place for concentrating auras into stories. As a curator, I can certainly shape that process, but I can’t determine it — there’s always plenty leftover aura overflowing whatever “container” I might devise. And that’s fine, because I’ve entirely neglected an aspect of the museum that is actually pretty much essential: the community it serves. The community a museum is. Which will be the focus of my next post in this series.

As Kerim noted a few weeks back, I am currently the director of the Burlesque Hall of Fame, a museum located in Las Vegas committed to preserving the history and legacy of burlesque as an artform and cultural phenomenon. If you had asked me a few years ago what direction I expected my career to develop in, I’d have never said “Museum Director.” Sure, I’d taken some museum studies courses in grad school and have worked in a couple of museums, but I always thought I’d help out with an exhibition here and there and that would be the extent of my involvement in museums.

Well, life, as they say, happens, and here I am today, responsible not just for an exhibition here and there but for a budget, a nation-wide volunteer network, a collection of 4,000+ artifacts, and a whole slew of legal, professional, and ethical concerns I’d barely even imagined 5 years ago. Since a) anthropology as we know it today grew out of museum practice, and b) the perspective of a museum worker has rarely been seen on Savage Minds, I thought I’d write up a few posts detailing some of the things that occupy my thoughts and time. I won’t be aiming for any grand theoretical statements here, just some musings on what constitutes life in the museum for this particular anthropologist.

And since it’s the question I deal with most, I thought I’d start with a discussion of what burlesque even is in the first place. Defining the field of study, so to speak. Easier said than done, I suppose — burlesque as an art form grades into and branches off from a lot of other theatrical traditions, and has been in a state of near-constant change for at least the last century-and-a-half.

The simplest definition of burlesque is “parody”, typically parody of the powerful by the powerless. In that sense, burlesque can be found in the very earliest theatrical traditions, with pretty clear burlesque elements being found in the plays of Classical Greeks and, closer to our own time, the work of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. By the mid-1800s, first in England then in the United States, large productions featuring what were, at the time, scandalously-clad dancing women and men (wearing tights that showed the shape of their legs and bodies as they danced) had become popular entertainments for emerging urban working and middle classes. Authors from William Makepeace Thackeray to Mark Twain to HL Mencken wrote books of burlesques, providing light humor for an increasingly literate populace.

The lavish extravaganzas of the big city productions were stripped down and sexed up for mass consumption by first minstrel shows and then vaudeville-style theaters, transforming by the turn of the 20th century into variety shows featuring skit humor, sideshow-style acts, and dancing girls. While the promise of a flash of tight-clad leg might have been a draw, the stars of the show were the comics, and not a few household names got their start on the adult-oriented stages of one of the burlesque “wheels”, nationwide circuits of theaters supplied every week with a new traveling show: Bob Hope, Abbott and Costello, Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, and dozens more.

By the early 1930s, two big changes occurred in burlesque, transforming it into something much more familiar to us today. The first is the siphoning off of comedic talent by radio and talking pictures. While comics remained part of the standard burlesque show lineup, many of the best comics left the grind of the road behind and settled down. At the same time, striptease emerged, shifting the emphasis away from the comics. Just in time, too — as family-friendly vaudeville was replaced by movies (the last vaudeville theater was converted to a movie house in the early ‘30s), its cousin burlesque could offer something neither vaudeville nor Code-era movies could: sex appeal.

By the ‘50s, strippers ruled the burlesque stage. But not “strippers” in today’s sense — striptease was never about showing off the naked body, it was about the process of getting there, the slow seduction of the fan dance offering glimpses of the female form, the tortuous tease of the burlesque artist peeling away layer after layer.

Of course, even as superstars like Blaze Starr and Tempest Storm reached the height of their fame, the culture was changing. Burlesque dancers opened the door, but they weren’t the only ones through. By the ‘60s and early ‘70s, topless gogo dancers, mainstream pornography (movies like Behind the Green Door and especially Deep Throat showed in the same movie theaters that showed The Godfather and 2001), even typical beachwear had made burlesque seem quaint, even a little prudish.

By the ‘80s, live erotic entertainment had solidified around the strip club, emphasis on the “strip”. Gone was the tease, replaced by women who started a set scantily clad, quickly stripped, and then took a turn on the pole or around the stage to collect tips. It’s fair to say that this is still the dominant form of live sexual performance, while hardcore pornography dominates the field of recorded sexual performance.

But these new developments met different needs than burlesque had. Remember, burlesque wasn’t just about the sex, it was about power. Burlesque is parody — when a poor immigrant girl from the ghetto steps onto stage in a fur coat and pearls and proceeds to take her clothes off, she’s not just showing off her body, she’s making a point about the put-on airs of the rich, the place of sexuality in the lives of people used to satisfying their desires through spending.

By the mid-’90s, burlesque was on its way back, with a new generation of women on the lookout for models of femininity a little more empowering than the bone-thin makeup platforms offered them by the likes of Cosmo. Part retro revival, part performance art, the new burlesque celebrated the diversity of bodies and the power of women’s sexuality (and, as time went by, increasingly offered alternative models of male sexuality and power as well).

Burlesque continues to change and evolve, making it many things to many people. As the director of a museum dedicated to burlesque, I feel very strongly that it is not my place, or my organization’s place, to try to produce a definitive definition of burlesque, to try to standardize the meaning of the word, but instead to reflect the way the meaning of the word has changed and continues to change — and hopefully to feed into that process. That said, I can offer a couple of identifying characteristics, a kind of “Field Guide” to identifying contemporary burlesque.

Basically,there are two characteristics of contemporary burlesque, of which at least one should be present. The first is striptease — burlesque dwells on the act of undressing, not on the state of being undressed. The second is humor — the best burlesque should make you laugh like crazy. That’s the big difference between what happens on a burlesque stage and what happens at a strip club: you almost never laugh at a strip club unless something’s gone terribly, and funnily, wrong. That’s not to say stripping, pole dancing, and other forms of adult entertainment aren’t valid in their own right (and quite a few burlesque performers have and do work in multiple fields), only that they’re not burlesque.

There are other factors that distinguish burlesque, especially today’s burlesque — the control the performer has over her act, choreography, and choice of music; the lack of lapdancing and other direct interactions with the audience off-stage; the typical lower limit of nudity being pasties and g-string; and so on — but striptease and humor are, in my opinion, the hallmarks.

So that’s burlesque, and that’s the world I live in. In my next piece, I’ll explore what kind of place a “museum” is, especially in today’s world of blurred disciplinary and institutional boundaries, always-on communications, and complex representational politics.

Anthropology is, in many ways, the art of taking implicit, taken-for-granted meanings and making them explicit. This is important because human beings cram a tremendous amount of meaning into everything we do, and yet much of the time we are only vaguely conscious of the meanings we surround ourselves with  — and if you are a cultural outsider, you may miss them entirely. Just as learning the grammar of a language will help you understand it and write clearly in it, learning to make cultural meanings explicit helps us understand and express ourselves to others. Take, for instance, the thinking woman’s crumpet.

The other night I was watching a documentary about Shakespeare written and presented by the historian Michael Wood. As the documentary went on and I spent more and more time watching Michael Wood describe the Tudor police state with great enthusiasm, it occurred to me that he might be physically attractive. So I turned to my wife and asked: “is he attractive?” She thought for a minute and said she didn’t think so. But since she is a professor, just to be sure, she looked him up on wikipedia. “Apparently,” she said, “he’s the thinking woman’s crumpet.”

If you are British, or an anglophile American, it is not too hard to understand what it means to say “Michael Wood is the thinking woman’s crumpet”. Implicitly, you might understand that educated middle-class women find Michael Wood attractive even though he is not conventionally attractive. But as an anthropologist, I want to move beyond this implicit awareness to a richer, more explicit understanding of this phrase, an understanding of it that explains what it means even if you don’t even know what a crumpet is, much less what it symbolizes to the British. I’ll begin by talking about what it means to be a ‘thinking woman’ and then I’ll move on to the ‘crumpet’.

The noun phrase “thinking women” seems at first cut to describe women who think, but this is not exactly right. I’m not British and not an anthropologist of Britain, so I may not have all the details right (anthropologists are, like everyone else, fallible). But the UK is a class-conscious place and I think that the term is meant to invoke a certain socioeconomic position and the entire set of habits and dispositions that come along with it: affluent and educated, refined enough to be attracted to someone’s personality as well as their looks, etc. ‘Thinking woman’ is just two words but for those with the cultural knowledge necessary to decode them it summons up an entire way of classifying people which is more or less systematic. In particular, it implicitly defines large swaths of the population as people who ‘don’t think’. These people are usually less wealthy, less educated, and less powerful than ‘thinking people’. Anthropology as a discipline often finds these kinds of systems of inequality hiding within our implicit meanings, and as a result we’ve grown to be very mindful of the way that power and inequality are omnipresent in human life.

In addition to class, the phrase “thinking woman’s crumpet” has a lot of implicit things about gender relations in the UK within it, things which can be (as we anthropologists like to say) ‘unpacked’ or made explicit. The term is actually a transformation of the pre-existing phrase ‘thinking man’s crumpet’. The phrase was (according to Wikipedia and Google) originally used to describe Joan Bakewell, a TV presenter in the sixties. The comedian who invented it did so as a joke but, like most labels that stick, it made explicit a set of ideas and desires that were at work implicitly. Bakewell was intelligent, articulate, and chic and object of desire for male viewers of a certain social position.

Something happens when you turn the phrase around so that women, rather than men, want ‘crumpet’. The idea that ‘thinking women’ can want ‘crumpet’ has a certain empowering air about it — if thinking men can find articulate and intelligent women attractive, why can’t thinking women find Michael Wood attractive? I would say that the phrase has a whiff of feminism about it (sensing cultural meaning, like smelling a scent, has a certain indomitability that comes from being deeply embodied, and yet is also intangible and ephemeral). But ‘feminism’ is the wrong word to use here, since the term invokes a cultural move that is opposed to the sexual objectification of women and other people. That ‘thinking woman’ can have ‘crumpet’ is an ’empowering appropriation of the male gaze’. Or, in plainer english, women assert their equality with men by adopting male ways of looking at and finding people attractive, ways which in themselves might seem sexist. Or, as the British say in another culinary metaphor that I don’t have time to unpack here, ‘what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’.

So that was ‘thinking woman’. Let’s turn now to ‘crumpet’, the second part of the phrase I’ve been examining.  As we’ve seen, there are people like Michael Wood, who is “thinking woman’s crumpet” and Joan Bakewell, who is “thinking man’s crumpet”. But what is plain, unmodified crumpet?

At a certain level, the answer can be easily found on wikipedia: crumpet is a griddle cake, one of the large number of foods Europeans (and the people in their settler colonies) cook by heating flour, water, a fat (typically butter) and a bit of salt and/or sugar on a griddle or pan and leavened with yeast and/or baking powder. If you can read this blog entry in the original English I wrote it in you will already be familiar with pancakes, biscuits, waffles, crepes, and similar foods which are the cousins of crumpets. Americans may even be familiar with “English muffins” which are something like crumpets.

Now we face the very common anthropological problem of people’s use of metaphor. Michael Wood, on the face of it, has almost nothing in common with crumpet. Crumpets are seven centimeters in diameter and Michael Wood is around six feet tall. Crumpets are inanimate, while Michael Wood moves under his own power and enthusiastically describes the Tudor police state. Crumpets are eaten by British people, but British people would consider completely disgusting the idea of killing and eating Michael Wood or Joan Bakewell or any other human.

Or would they? Like many peoples, the British often draw metaphors between people and food, and in the metaphor hunger for the food is equated with sexual desire (an anthropologist would describe both of these as ‘appetitive longing’). Thus, for instance, a pastry shell filled with fruit called a ‘tart’ is often used as a metaphor for a sexually promiscuous woman.

And in fact ‘crumpet’ is a term used to describe a certain kind of sexually attractive woman. My knowledge of this topic is extremely limited, but according to the youtube documentary “Crumpet – A Very British Sex Symbol” the term originated in the 1930s with the rise of mass media such as the television and film. It denoted scantily clad, voluptuous women whose appearance in movies and television was inappropriate but not actually pornographic. The pieces they appeared in were low-brow and down-market — vulgar and working class. Apparently men of the thinking class weren’t supposed to like that sort of crumpet. They preferred Joan Blakewell.  At times there’s a strong feel of class warfare to the youtube documentary — for instance where the narrator accuses Monty Python of objectifying Carol Cleveland while other films (not made by Oxbridge grads) present crumpets as empowered in their sexuality.

It’s hard for me to say as a cultural outsider and non-expert, but I think that calling a woman ‘crumpet’ evokes a wide range of associations: just as a crumpet is not a proper, nutritious meal, crumpets are not properly modest women; watching a crumpet on TV, like eating a crumpet, is a sort of cheap fullfilment — perhaps a guilt pleasure? Do working class people eat crumpet while upper class people eat some other sort of griddle cake? Its hard to say.

All I wanted to establish here is that even simple phrases like “thinking woman’s crumpet” contain within themselves incredible depth. Because they are part of a tightly interwoven and rich cultural system, understanding them requires that they be placed in their cultural context. In this case, this involves everything from British food to the class system to the history of mass media. At the same time, making the meanings of ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ explicit makes cultural insiders see their own culture in a new way because it forces them to rethink what they used to take for granted — indeed, it may actually prompt some of them to learn about television shows and movies that have shaped their culture in ways they didn’t previously understand. Above all, unpacking the term ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ allows us to take a look at how anthropologists interpret cultural materials.

A similar issue has arisen in anthropological research on Muslims in North America. In the conclusion to Katherine Pratt Ewing’s edited volume, Being and Belonging (2008), Andrew Shryock called for greater attention to “the immediate and mediated worlds…articulated in everyday life” (206). So, how should one strike a balance between studying media and the everyday? One could study the everyday dimensions of production practices, or how the reception of media is incorporated into people’s everyday lives, or how and why media producers construct the everyday in certain ways.

This issue is especially relevant to many members of the Muslim community in North America and those who conduct research on/with them. Last year I attended two large conferences: The American Academy of Religion (San Francisco, November 2011) and the Islamic Society of North America (Chicago, July 2011). Religious adherents, spokespersons and academics all converged on the notion that engaging with media (news, entertainment, and social media) was the most vital means to influence public opinion about Muslims. I heard numerous panels where professors, journalists, filmmakers, writers, students, etc. discussed the benefits and pitfalls of media activism. Such a large degree of interest solidified my focus on the anthropology of media and Islam by generating more questions than answers. But what about the everyday?

I share Shryock’s view that ethnographies of the everyday lives of Muslims in North America could add texture to our understanding of post-9/11 Muslim identity formations, while also humanizing the Muslim ‘Other’. Yet, television shows about everyday Muslim lives have reached more Muslim and non-Muslim American homes than any ethnography could dream of. Even though an ethnography of actual lives could provide a much needed point of comparison with televisual representations, it seems just as pressing to ethnographically research the construction and reception of the everyday in tv programs.

An ideal approach would analyze the relationship between the everyday in televisual media and lived realities. But, there is no guarantee that such moments would arise during fieldwork and would probably have to be one dimension of a larger study. For this reason, internet sites could prove useful for analyzing how Muslims discuss such shows and apply them to life situations (more on this in the next post), as well as understanding how non-Muslims make sense of them. Another possibility would be to approach the relationship between the everyday and media in a sideways manner (see my last post). This would entail interpreting one in light of the other without positing an underlying unity.

How do you perceive the relationship between media and the everyday? What are some other fruitful directions to pursue?