No Culture in the Cockpit Please!

“It is a common error to attribute this irreducibility of difference to the influence of ‘culture’, or more precisely to the exclusive relationship each individual is supposed to have with ‘his’ culture.”
– Jean-Francois Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity

When unfortunate accidents happen, like plane crashes, people sit on the edges of their (cultural) seats to await the official word regarding how the mishap took place and what could have prevented such a casualty from occurring. This may be especially true when fatalities are involved. Unforeseen mechanical errors are a bit easier to swallow and stomach than outright human error and oversight, although human im/precision is already involved in ensuring that equipment works safely. Continue reading “No Culture in the Cockpit Please!”

In Place/Out of Place

1002124_10152985753095487_1101120275_nAs I recall Bruce Lincoln remarking in Authority: Construction and Corrosion, if you want to see how systems of authority work, then you need to study them when they break down (as he did in the case of one of former President Reagan’s interrupted speeches); for we can’t usually see them when they’re functioning properly, since we take them for granted as part of the landscape. Continue reading “In Place/Out of Place”

Crocodile Tears

paula deen today show crying 660 videograb1Food Channel viewers in the U.S. will know the popular celebrity cook Paula Deen and the controversy, that hit the media about a month ago, over past racially-charged statements that she confirmed making in a court deposition. One of the things that interests me about this episode is the media response, especially speculations on whether the tears she shed in a morning talk show interview were real or fake — i.e., were sincere (making her apology legitimate and heart-felt) or staged (and thus a manipulative attempt to, I don’t know, save some of her business contracts by resuscitating her public image). Continue reading “Crocodile Tears”

Habla Espanol?

menu_crispy_tacosI was at Chipotle this weekend, waiting to order my favorite fast food (crunchy chicken tacos with veggies, heavy on the corn salsa).   The man behind me in line spoke fluent English to a child with him, but when it was his turn at the counter, he looked at the young female employee and began ordering in Spanish.  The glitch in the plan was that while he was talking to a woman with brown skin (who, according to popular identifiers, might have a better chance of being a Spanish-speaker than others), she was not a Spanish speaker at all; in fact, as she pointed out to him, she was Asian.  After a few embarrassing laughs the burrito bowls and extra guac were ordered, and everyone scooted out the door. Continue reading “Habla Espanol?”

“Where There is Dirt There is System”

coalminerIf, as so many scholars now think to be the case, the participant’s self-representation is crucial to take into account when studying human behavior, then I’d hazard a guess that coal miners, while working underground, do not consider themselves to be dirty — at least not until they break for lunch or end their long shift in the dark. Continue reading ““Where There is Dirt There is System””

Making Religion Central

A book in the local library, Chris Stedman’s 2012 memoir Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious (Boston: Beacon Press), attracted my interest recently. In this book, Stedman, who self-identifies as an atheist, promotes pluralism and interfaith dialogue among the religious and non-religious. He strives to encourage people of different commitments to respect and listen to each other, as well as challenge each other, to counter the belligerent approach to religious people of those dubbed the New Atheists. He asserts that reconciliation can legitimize the status of the non-religious within society in a way that belligerence towards the religious never can. Continue reading “Making Religion Central”

Finding the Edges of a World Without End

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If my previous post made any sense then scholars ought to cease looking for meaning, identity, or significance in the objects studied (like the holiness of the altar or debating which Muslim is the proper sort of Muslim). Rather than doing interpretive, let alone normative, studies we’ll instead examine the usually taken-for-granted systems that groups of people use to make sense of their world–to make the world as it happens to be into a manageable world that, if done “properly,” more than likely appears to all of us as if it always has been that way and therefore ought to continue being that way. Continue reading “Finding the Edges of a World Without End”

Mythologies

mythologiesThere are few more relevant books for those interested in how systems of representation — in the most mundane and thus often unnoticed places — enable historical happenstance to be portrayed/perceived as timeless necessity than Roland Barthes‘s (d. 1980) classic collection, Mythologies. Originally published in the newspaper as brief commentaries on popular French culture, the short chapters have appended to them a lenghty theoretical essay, “Myth Today,” in which Barthes explains his approach to studying the multi-layered semiotic systems that we routinely see in daily life. In many ways, Mythologies, and the companion collection, The Eiffel Tower, model in their brevity but theoretical consequence what blog posts such as this site aspire to.