Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Savage Minds: The Opposite of Anthropology

Hello everyone,

I was browsing through some of the other posts when I came across this article and another discussion thread on the merit of Christian Lander's blog, Stuff White People Like. Just for the record, I love this blog for its color and nuance, but I also think it raises a larger issue about the way culture around the world is studied. After reviewing Nielsen and Murphy's textbook, A History of Anthropological Theory, I noticed that most social thinkers derive from four countries: Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. From these presupposed academic superpowers, scholars then disperse and investigate the far corners of the world, immersing themselves in foreign lands but still observing with a distinctly Western eye.

Lander's blog instantly (and sometimes uncomfortably) transforms the world's historically predominant observer (i.e. white people) into the observed. In conversation with my non-Caucasian friends, we've all wondered whether Lander was also Caucasian or not, because, according to one friend, "no white person would ever realize the things that we see all the time." Then it hit me: what if this blog is actually doing more harm than good? What if we're simply passing the buck of racism from one group to another, rather than opening up a more educated dialogue on the matter? Let's face it: if Lander were to write about "Stuff Black People Like" or something to that nature, he would be branded without hesitation as a white supremacist. So why is writing about white people somehow okay? (I may have answered this question earlier...)

Since it's inevitable that we compare everything to anthropological archetypes, I'd like to continue the matter of armchair anthropology place in the field today. A lot of Lander's writings remind of me James Frazer's trite assumptions on various artifacts collected throughout the globe as written in The Golden Bough, although Lander is far more satirical. Sure, Lander hasn't done the kind of thorough investigate field work that is expected of a true scholar, but it's hard to not acknowledge the "truths" that the site offers, albiet extremely stereotypical and perhaps even offensive. Although racism and comedy have had a long and tumultuous marriage for centuries, I continue to struggle with drawing the line between what brings humanity forward and what sets it back. I'd like to say Lander's work is a step forward, but I'd also like to hear any dissenting voices on the matter.

For the record, I'd like to keep the discussion in the pursuit of clarity and not noise. I'm not interested in pointing fingers and arguing over "who did what to who," but more to reconcile these challenges we face as scholars of humanity. I leave the floor to you.

1 comment:

Taylor said...

Lee,

Interesting topic. I haven't weighed in nearly enough (that is, at all) on this blog, but here's my two cents (and a bit more). The latter Savage Minds thread suggests poses the question about whether Lander is, in fact, doing a kind of anthropology, which seems to be one way into Lee's question (which I take to be what to make of SWPL: good cultural analysis or bad, even (reverse?) racist commentary veiled by slightly off-color jokes).

So:

The argument for Lander doing anthropology:
1) Reflects on the taken-for-granted, opens the given or assumed to investigation, reveals some kind of deeper meaning and/or structure (this is a variety of what Marilyn Strathern has called 'literalisation': making the implicit explicit). All with humor no less!
2) Gets paid to think about 'race', 'class', 'gender', and 'culture' (do we need more of a definition for anthropology?)
3) Places an emphasis on clever writing.

The argument against Lander doing anthropology:
1) He has no real method (this is not ethnography). As one reply on Savage Minds reads, this makes him, at best, a cultural commentator. (Or an 'armchair anthropologist.')
2) He may reflect on implicit middle-class, white ways of life in the US, but he surprises no one. He gives us no context, no history, no connections to other domains of knowledge. He only offers us a list of descriptive (and hilarious) characteristics; in other words, he is revealing very little (tells us what we already know).
3) Has not taken the 'step back' that most anthropologists have following the discursive turn of the 80s and 90s. That is, he does not provide any reflection on his own (knowledge-producing) enterprise.

4) But the real winner, in my mind, is the argument that Lander does not address the real issues at work in his blog: Why do people always want to know if he's white or not? Why do people always argue about whether the blog is 'really' about race or class? And what makes his observations funny?

In other words, as Chris Kelty put it (paraphrasing Gretchen/Comet Jo): “Lander, an anthropologist? Cute, but a real anthropologist would be talking about WHY they like that stuff.” (Also read the last comment in the thread linked above.)

(A tangential point: The real question a question like Kelty's points to is what, in fact constitutes anthropology? As we know, the best way to know an entity is to consider it's limit case. The responses above and in the comments give some limited sense of what might count as anthropology.)

So, for Lee's question. It seems to me that if Lander is in fact doing anthropology, he's doing 'anthropology-at-home'. As he readily admits, the humor is self-deprecatory. Indeed, the blog makes use of the same type of stereotypes that in a different context would be considered essentializing, simplifying, harmful, racist, etc. But it seems to me to use such stereotypes consciously (and to great effect: it usually has the target audience--white people of course, however you want to define them--laughing uproariously, shouting something like, 'That's SO true!'). Perhaps this doesn't make a difference. But I think I would argue, provisionally at least, that while Lander offers us, in the end, little in terms of penetrating analysis, he does give others plenty to think about, he does generate plenty of questions, and he does point the way to interesting areas for thought. (And this is, in fact, exactly what we should expect: Strathern also writes that the practice of literalisation, in the process of making the implicit explicit, must necessarily generate additional assumptions, new implicit or taken-for-granted domains, and thus that Western knowledge production furnishes an ever-receding horizon towards which we may continuously direct our analytical gaze.)