Month: November 2013

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Ear Hustlin’: Notes from the Field

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Culture on the Edge‘s Monica Miller is presenting at Skepticon 6, which is held annually in Springfield, Missouri. While there, she’ll be sending us her notes from the field.

Most people who know me well know how much I dislike flying — it makes me anxious, nervous, and worried about being lifted off the “ground of certainty,” so to speak. In order to distract myself from the angst I often feel while being in the air, I turn my own anthropological mirror against myself — as data, taking stock of all the religious-like-type-traces and rituals of certainty that rather unconsciously inform my habitus in moments of perceived uncertainty (I’ll spare you the hilarious and somewhat embarrassing details). Continue reading “Ear Hustlin’: Notes from the Field”

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“No, Really, Where Are You From?”

race“Race” is such a problematic, complex term, no? We use it as if it refers to some stable thing (like when we complete a government form) but as soon as we look at its use more closely we realize it is a vague designation for a variety that spans a limitless continuum with no clear internal boundaries. “Race” — as in “What race are you?” — is thus our way of creating the impression of managing what may in fact be unbridled human difference, as if it has nicely defined internal compartments.

Case in point: the fellow above — Alex Sugiura — was featured in a story recently (and another a little before that), on the increasingly mixed race nature of American culture. He’s from Brooklyn but, of course, that’s not where he’s really from, right? Continue reading ““No, Really, Where Are You From?””

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Get Poked

EquinoxLooking for a Culture on the Edge button while at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature next week? Then consider stopping by the book display and finding the Equinox Publishers booth. There’s bound to be some there.

On the Edge pinsAnd while you’re there, consider whether your own work fits the larger project that we’re working on, here at the Edge. We have a book series with Equinox (edited by our own Steven Ramey) and we’re eager to consider proposals, for both monographs and essay collections, that explore the ongoing work of identification across a variety of historical and social sites.

 

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Know Thyself

Picture 4Retronaut recently posted a little Roman Catholic devotional booklet from 1927, “Examination of Conscience for Boys and Girls” — a booklet on identifying sins, “especially adapted for the age and circumstances of the average boy or girl in grade school.” Hunting around the web you can find mention of the publishing house begun in 1913, in St. Louis, that produced it (and a variety of its other such pamphlets, such as this one form the 1940s on the dangers of divorce [PDF]) — known as “The Queen’s Work,” and also learn that this popular pre-Vatican II children’s booklet went through at least 29 printings by the early 1950s. Continue reading “Know Thyself”

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We’re All Counting on You

Picture 1Did you see this recent article at slate.com? I think it’s fascinating — why? Well, not because of the proverbial tribe that’s been found in deepest, darkest wherever, but because of the manner in which the article itself so nicely brings to light the (likely inevitable) problems associated with coming to know anything about the world around us. For in a piece on a group of people who apparently have no numbers in their language system (or at least an inability to think of quantities larger than a few) we see a whole bunch of numbers used by the article’s author to itemize big facts. There’s around 700 of these people, we’re told; we first learned about them in 2007, in a magazine article that was — count ’em! — 12,000 words in length.

My point? Unless we privilege our language system as if it is in sync with reality itself — as happens so often, when we start talking about facts — one can’t help but see this story as a moment when two no less local systems bump into each other (something I’m thinking from my position within one of them, of course — how crazy is that?). For our ability to “think itemized quantity” is so self-evident to us that we’re perplexed by how they get along without it — the “it” here is taken as a fact of nature and not some quirky acquisition that we happen to have, of course. That is, why isn’t the article on how peculiar it is that other language systems even have numbers?

Of course we have no choice but to use local assumptions and concepts and curiosities in coming to know those we take to be our others but we too often make the mistake of failing to see these assumptions and concepts and curiosities as our tools. Instead, we (especially if we happen to be in dominant groups) speak loudly and slowly and say such things as “How do you say ‘religion’ in your language?” — as if the fact that we happen to divide up and name the world in this or that way necessarily has some corresponding dance partner in all human systems.

Whether hubris or laziness accounts for this, it’s worth mulling over that a change in attitude toward owning our assumptions and concepts and curiosities might be the first step in doing any sort of interesting work on this thing we’re calling identification.

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The Fact Tank

fact tankThe Pew Research Center has a blog, named the Fact Tank, that is a component of an intriguing way of branding itself.

Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

They reinforce what initially caught my eye in this, the language “fact tank”, when they emphasize their role to “inform” us of what is influencing society through “empirical” research. Continue reading “The Fact Tank”