It’s interesting in light of this to compare David Graeber’s and Peter Pel’s (1998) work on the fetish. Although both Graeber and Pels acknowledge all the same features that distinguish the fetish, they seem to reach strikingly different conclusions. In Graeber’s discussion, the fetish illustrates the tendency of human groups to treat their own social creations as somehow having power them rather than the other way around. His main point about the circulation of objects of “alien” or foreign…
ContinueAdded by Ken Routon on March 31, 2011 at 4:05pm — 18 Comments
A few days ago I read an article in the Observer saying that Britain's right wing prime minister, David Cameron, had based one of his core ideas - 'The Big Society' - on Ernst Shumacher's book Small is Beautiful (truthfully nobody knows if the BS is an 'idea' or even what it means). The newsmedia also informs us that the government is trying to change the academic research…
ContinueAdded by Huon Wardle on March 30, 2011 at 2:00pm — No Comments
Added by QI Xiaoguang on March 29, 2011 at 10:00pm — No Comments
Added by Alexander Lee on March 27, 2011 at 11:36pm — 16 Comments
Ken Routon's posts on fetishizing the foreign have surely made me think. It's easy to regard an insider's preference for something foreign imported from an outside culture as a fetish. One can even go further by becoming postcolonialist and material culturist and dropping theories that range from the overstretched to the overanalyzed. It's interesting how a bottle of perfume can touch almost anything complete with theoretical assumptions. I'm not really allergic to theories, but I just…
ContinueAdded by M Izabel on March 27, 2011 at 11:25pm — 17 Comments
Added by Hussain Bux Mallah on March 23, 2011 at 9:45am — No Comments
Added by Hussain Bux Mallah on March 23, 2011 at 9:40am — No Comments
Added by Hussain Bux Mallah on March 23, 2011 at 9:30am — 1 Comment
Last night Flipbook drew my attention to two items that may be of some interest to the anthropologists gathered here. The first is
Strata Allows You to Play Fantasy Football - With Scientists…
Added by John McCreery on March 23, 2011 at 3:30am — No Comments
It would seem that the manipulation of objects of alien value – or, the making and manipulation of images of foreign peoples and things (and I may be confusing here two issues that are best treated separately) – might serve at least two possible functions, both the flipside of the other. In both cases, it would appear that what we’re really talking about is the capacity of foreign objects/images to provoke estrangement (even if the subject of this estrangement may differ in each case). If…
ContinueAdded by Ken Routon on March 22, 2011 at 4:46pm — 2 Comments
The first issue of the new project "anthropologies" is up! Thanks to Alyson O'Daniel, Megan Maurer, David Picard, Stacie Gilmore, and Keith Hart for helping me get this first issue up and running. Check it out and (more importantly) comment and post your responses to the conversation. This is definitely meant to be a project that invites collaboration, participation, and input--so fire away. Things get most…
ContinueAdded by ryan anderson on March 15, 2011 at 7:30pm — 16 Comments
Back home, when we have natural calamities, we turn to God to make sense of our experience and suffering. We pray for help and also ask why such things happen, and of all, to us. We have a word similar to karma called "gaba." A landslide that kills miners is considered a nature's gaba to the men who deface and defile the environment. We view nature as a powerful avenger and ally that avenges for the oppressed. If a cargo ship sinks after a giant wave hits it, it is…
ContinueAdded by M Izabel on March 15, 2011 at 7:16pm — 11 Comments
Foreign Perfume and Other Fetishes, Part I
Some Notes on the Senses and Commodity Fetishism
There’s a Cuban joke that goes something like this: While visiting a local secondary school, Fidel turns to one of the children and, patting them affectionately on the head, says, “Tell me, son, what do you want to be when you grow up?” The child ponders the question for a moment but soon looks up and says, enthusiastically, “A…
ContinueAdded by Ken Routon on March 15, 2011 at 12:24am — 7 Comments
There is one overarching theme that crops up in these readings that I can’t stop thinking about: democracy. I have read several histories and ethnographies that talk about US interventions and policies in Latin America, and the stories are usually pretty similar. This book by Greg Grandin provides more of the same: the US took a position on Guatemala that was completely anti-democratic, all in the name of democracy.
Grandin writes about this…
Added by ryan anderson on March 13, 2011 at 5:00pm — 2 Comments
Lately, I’ve been considering how I might combine three of my great interests – ethnography, journalism, and storytelling – to forge an alternative career path for myself. Given my recent preoccupations, Nathan Dobson’s short but thought provoking analysis on the role of “facts” in journalism caught my attention.…
ContinueAdded by Ken Routon on March 10, 2011 at 10:30pm — 8 Comments
The current corruption investigations in my country have pained me. Two military generals alone stole and laundered about five hundred million pesos each from the national treasury. Those funds were intended to modernize the Philippine military, hire and equipped Filipino soldiers, and pay well UN-assigned police forces in many global hot spots. One million pesos or twenty thousand dollars are enough to pay two top-rated brain surgeons annually in my country.
Lately, I …
ContinueAdded by M Izabel on March 6, 2011 at 7:17pm — 7 Comments
In Cabinet Magazine, issue 27, there is an article titled Readymade Remade about Pierre Pinoncelli who first made a big name for himself by pissing in Marcel Duchamp's readymade urinal. The article examines Pinoncelli's argument that he was bringing history and value to the urinal by doing so. While the French gov't did not agree with Pinoncelli at all, especially after Pinoncelli pissed in the same urinal again in…
ContinueAdded by Alexander Lee on March 4, 2011 at 7:00am — 6 Comments
posted here as well, Meaning in the face of Annihilation
A few days ago, I was showing houses to an old friend who is now a client. It was raining and we had passed by a smaller duplex. The pictures on the MLS aren't the same as seeing the context of the property with your own eyes. After seeing it, he…
ContinueAdded by Alexander Lee on March 1, 2011 at 9:00am — 2 Comments
Added by John McCreery on March 1, 2011 at 2:00am — 2 Comments
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