A Peer Reviewed Blog
In the U.S. today is Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday established in 1986 to commemorate the life and achievements of the noted civil rights leader who was tragically assassinated outside his motel room in Memphis in 1968.
His daughter, Bernice King, who is the executive director of the Atlanta-based King Center for Nonviolent Social Change, has been widely quoted as recently saying the following to the Reuters news service: Continue reading “We Are the World”
I found this interesting pic online not long ago and it occurred to me that the sort of alternative approach to identity being entertained at Culture on the Edge — an approach to identification that structurates and historicizes agency and intention — is likely one that runs counter to the commonsense notion of the individual, of the self, that most of us have, making this idea of the individual itself a social thing. This alternative approach therefore places emphasis on the collective situation in which our idea of the individual comes into existence as a discursive item, as a social, legal, political fiction which helps to make possible the worlds that we take for granted.
Case in point: private ownership is possible only once we have legally defined and distinguished individuals in place.
To entertain such a radically historicized and socialized notion of the self, of identification as a means to signify the self, means that we have to be willing to entertain that we, each of us, are not special, at least not how we usually think of it. Instead, we might consider that we become special to certain people, at specific times, for particular reasons. We thus turn our attention to the strategies of specialization, as an ongoing process and series of discrete practices, rather than seeing its product as a free floating, transcendental value — much like the move from expressing an identity to studying the techniques and sites of identification.
If we insist on thinking of ourselves as unique, as special, as rugged individuals who stand out from the crowd, then, it is because of the others to whom we are related, in structured situations not of our making. What makes us stand out, in short, are the shoulders we’re thrust upon.
An interesting, though brief, story was on the radio this morning, concerning the September 1, 2010, ban on smoking in enclosed public places in Greece — a ban that I think it fair to say has only gradually gained some traction among the Greek public.
Give it a listen. Continue reading “But is That News?”
Did you catch this episode of The Sopranos (back in 2002 [Season 4, episode 3])? Sure, there’s a fair bit of swearing in the clip below, but we’re all adults here, right? Continue reading “The Strong Silent Type”
Two days ago, and then again yesterday, I wrote a couple of related posts on the way that, despite how cutting edge they may seem, many approaches to identity presuppose that classification systems merely manage pre-existing material. Given that I understand it rather differently — seeing, instead, contingent but authorized grids as the way that we create that sense of place and time that we call identity (also known as significance or relationships of similarity and difference) — most approaches strike me as conservative and problematic inasmuch as they fail to historicize the identity they purport to study, i.e., they fail to examine contingent identification practices (also known as those very same systems and grids that we create, authorize, contest, and otherwise just manage) and, in so doing, they merely naturalize their products, as if we all just know where we are on the globe without that fairly recent invention that we call longitude and latitude. Continue reading “Do This, Don’t Do That”
Yesterday I posted on the trouble when people think that identities somehow predate the classification systems that, as I see it, actually make them possible to begin with — it’s the mark of a pretty conservative approach inasmuch as it quite literally conserves and reinforces the very thing that we, as scholars, could instead be theorizing. It’s likely a normal part of identity creation (i.e., identification) but for those who think they’re studying how identity works, rather than just creating it, inhabiting it, celebrating it, or criticizing it, well, we likely need to employ a different approach.
But don’t just take my word for it. Continue reading “What Day is it Today…?”
Ever wonder how a imperial dominance works? Consider this, admittedly, fun video in which all the objects in the Oxford museum — including the ancient ones! — all know and love Christmas carols. Continue reading “Everyone Loves a Good Christmas Carol, No?”
Are you following what’s now unfolding in the US state of Oklahoma? No? As just reported in The Huffington Post:
For scholars of religion this is just too rich an example not to grab hold of and ride as far as it will take us. Continue reading “Not Just Anything Goes”
Did you see Google’s new ad, released not long ago and which is part of their Google India strategy? It’s quite effective. Continue reading “Selling the Human”
For those interested in historical narratives and the topic of origins, consider the following documentary from 2007, about the rock group that, as it turns out, just happened to have been formed when George Harrison had dinner with Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. Continue reading ““Just By Magic””