Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction
Interview with Gary A. Olson

Geertz: I was trained in the fifties, so I was trained as a New Critic. Close reading is important to me. Though I agree with many of the critiques of the New Critics, I often remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's "soul" and such things. I still have a fair amount of nostalgia for New Critical discipline and for close reading, and there hasn't been that in anthropology.

posted by neel master at 10:15 AM

An Interview with Nicholson Baker
Alexander Laurence and David Strauss

AL: In The Mezzanine and The Fermata you have focused on the lives of office workers. What is the interest there?

NB: In Vox too, I would say that they're professionals of some kind, with office jobs. To say something about "Temps."--the notion of a person who is part of a situation but isn't engaged the way everyone else in it is, linked up for me the theme of the book. When you have the power to drop into the fold or create a fermata, you can be part of a situation, that isn't going on at all. You can think about it at the same time as it's suspended in the state of almost happening. Of course the temp is the lowest on the totem pole, the least promising character, the one with the least amount of power; he is the equivalent of the earplug or the shoelace. It turns out that he has all these thoughts, disturbing and objectionable.

posted by neel master at 10:14 AM

Down on the Farm: The surprising prejudice against country people

Wendell Berry

Disparagement of farmers, of small towns, of anything identifiable as "provincial" can be found everywhere: in comic strips, TV shows, newspaper editorials, literary magazines, and so on. I believe it is a fact, proven by their rapidly diminishing numbers and economic power, that the world’s small farmers and other "provincial" people have about the same status now as enemy civilians in wartime. They are the objects of small, "humane" consideration, but if they are damaged or destroyed "collaterally," then "we very much regret it," but they were in the way—and, by implication, not quite as human as "we" are. The industrial and corporate powers, abetted and excused by their many dependents in government and the universities, are perpetrating a sort of economic genocide—less bloody than military genocide, to be sure, but just as arrogant, foolish, and ruthless, and perhaps more effective in ridding the world of a kind of human life.

Am I trying to argue that all small farmers are superior or that they are all good farmers or that they live the "idyllic life"? I certainly am not. And that is my point. The sentimental stereotype is just as damaging as the negative one. The image of the farmer as the salt of the earth, independent son of the soil, and child of nature is a sort of lantern slide projected over the image of the farmer as simpleton, hick, or redneck.

posted by neel master at 10:13 AM