Synaxis TV

• Woke late and did some laundry.
• Paid rent and went to Panera to do some grading.
  • It went by pretty fast.
• Hubert showed up then Carolyn came a little while later.
  • Hubert had some crazy papers and Carolyn shopped for primates.
• Hubert and I went to Chik-Fil-A for all you can eat nuggets.
  • Polynesian sauce is tasty. There were lots of people there excited about nuggets. Hubert was shocked by their sincere niceness. We ate lots of nuggets and talked about backhanded compliments: “It must be the light, but you look really good!”
• Quick stop at Office Max.
• Took a nap and did some more laundry.

I always face these little difficulties in figuring out just where I fit in my discipline, and some recent material I came across doesn’t help.

One of the difficulties is that, while I enjoy a lot of the material I am expected to be familiar with in other fields as an anthropologist, it is often difficult to see how they productively inform my project(s).

I do know that they provide some understanding of how we got where we are today, and they also offer glimpses of different systems of meaning — which is my ultimate goal in making various visions of other cultures more accessible. But the questions I have are much more focused on this particular moment in human existence.

Well, the reason I have those little discplinary twinges now is that as I was looking at cultural studies again I found that it really captures and describes the work that I am doing.

The first characteristic feature of cultural studies is that it is, as I say, an engaged study of culture. By engagement—let me repeat—I mean a sensitivity to the ways in which culture is (in part) a field of power-relations involving centres and peripheries, status hierarchies, connections to norms that impose repressions or marginalisations. But I also mean a commitment to celebrating or critiquing cultural forms (often in relation to the social field in which they are produced), to producing accounts of culture that can be fed back into cultural production and/or to producing new connections between various cultural forms and people (mainly, of course, students) in ‘ordinary life’.

So there it is. My primary engagement with culture is with issues of power in mind. And cultural studies draws on a lot of the aspects of literary work that I find productive. Indeed the names associated with cultural studies are all ones that I am familiar with and draw upon — Marx, Foucault, Butler.

I’m not really sure what this means but I at least haven’t concluded that it means I should switch disciplines. I still think that anthropology is the best home for me, but I do need to do some more research into cultural studies.

• Downloaded some dj mixes.
• TAed for anth 341.
  • Apollonian vs. Dionysian.
• Spent some time in the office.
• Watched part of this Navajo video for anth 303.
• Went to Panera with Carolyn.
  • She told me about some crazy prankster teacher she had in school.
• Took a nap at home.
• Went to the Smokehouse with Hubert and Carolyn
  • I had some brisket and we wondered how long we could stay inside a building.
• Went to see Capote with Hubert and Carolyn.
  • He was kind of a jerk.

I’m here at a library on campus and noticed that this older asian guy still had the $1.75 sticker on his glasses up near the top. Crazy!