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Oct. 2nd, 2007 10:40 amOne of the best features of blogs, for me, is their capacity to explore not so much half-baked as quarter-baked ideas. At its worst, this capacity leads to the pooling of ignorance, and we see lots of that even in putatively intelligent weblogs. At its best, it leads to exchanges that confirm the supposition that the most blessed faculty of the human mind is its inability to correlate all its contents.
The little exchange in the foregoing post about the trope from the Gospels, for example, does no more than confirm the process that Samuel Beckett summarized so memorably in Waiting for Godot (where either Vladimir or Estragon remembers his enforced childhood reading of the Bible in terms of the pretty colors of the maps of Palestine). And that thought could lead me off on a rehearsal of how that play summarized, for the postwar world of half a century ago, of the sense of the futility of religion and philosophy and the social sciences alike (Lucky’s speech of nonsensical intellectual fragments spewed forth at the demand of his entrepreneurial master, “Think, pig!”), and set forth the sad encounters of a society left stranded in a desolate landscape where raw power was occasionally viewed in its most unintentionally obvious forms.
But I won’t go there, although it vaguely segues into my discussion of the book that has occasioned this hopefully short post, viz., Shanny Peer’s France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. I’ve plunged into the latter pages, bypassing the Popular Front politics of the romanticization of regionalism. And am struck by Peer’s ability to produce insights about the counterpoint between folk regionalism and modernization in both left and right in the 1930s (and up to the present, one should add).
I haven’t been back to Paris to view the new ethnographic museum, which apparently is catching its own species of hell for exoticizing the contexts of world cultures, but one of the things that struck me about the old Musée de l’Homme was its proclivity to lump together cultures that for me didn’t belong in the same museum…Paleolithic rock carvings and Siberian shaman costumes and Ethiopian church frescoes sawn right out of the rock and exported to Paris. And, if I recall correctly, Eastern European dance costumes.
But until the 1937 opening of the Palais de Chaillot the folklore and customs of France had been included in that hodgepodge, the point being that any pre-Cartesian practices that couldn’t be enfolded into the onward march of civilization were to be grouped together as interesting primitive holdovers that ultimately belonged with the cave paintings. By the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the French Pavilion was celebrating regional customs and diversity for reasons other than promoting Depression-era tourism, just as the WPA travel guides produced in Roosevelt’s America were about more than promoting travel.
There was still an impulse towards producing a single French national narrative, just as there was an impulse towards producing a single American national narrative. But celebrating difference as contributing to unity was more than empty sentiment, though it had, and continues to have, unpredictable consequences.
I’ve written before in this blog about the ironies of the efforts of Vichy bureaucrats to promote the new triad of Work, Family and Homeland (or Fatherland, to use the gendered form of “Patrie”) in place of the old one of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood). In Indochina and in other colonies, the effort to marshal local traditions for the greater goals of Petain’s National Revolution ended up providing fresh anti-colonial fodder by providing regional substitutes for, say, Jeanne d’Arc. The impulse to celebrate the sons and daughters of the local soil ended up being as counterproductive as the use of the fabled standardized history textbook wherein the descendants of Martiniquais slaves read about “our ancestors, the Gauls.”
(Again, it’s the impossibly specialized title that leads the mind off in productively vast directions regarding cultural interactions: Eric T. Jennings’ Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944.)
Anyway, today we tend to have specialized scraps of popular culture alongside a few tales remembered from our grandparents as our collective cultural inheritance, but the dynamics of the interplay between local knowledge and (post)modern global information (or pseudo-information) proceeds along lines of force and tension that can be perceived in Peer’s narrative of how to present the stuff of the 1937 and 1939 world expositions.
And as I noted regarding Wade Davis’ Light at the Edge of the World, today we have not just re-enfolded folklore into that immense Museum of the Human Endeavor, but the world of information technology and media arts and all the rest of our contemporary enterprise. The creations of what Davis terms “a wildly inquisitive and astonishinglyh adaptive species” prove difficult to prise apart; the predictably delusional reactions of intercontinental investment analysts obey the same mental laws as the category mistakes of tribal hunters making their way through the malarial swamp, and the technological adaptations of those same hunters to the handful of available resources turn out to be as nuanced and inventive as the innovations of the writers of software. This is not the same thing as saying that some cultures are not more maladaptive than others, as anyone who has looked for more than five minutes at their own family dysfunctions will have realized.
That would lead, and did, into a now-erased digression about our inclination to oversimplify the individual and collective forces shaping any given group or individual’s destiny. But as I recall, I was originally talking about folklore and the changing contents of our inherited mental equipment, so maybe I should just stop with the observation that a self-critical look at the workings of any functional culture makes the more maladapted among us feel properly humble.
Some of us could no more detoxify manioc properly than we could get Dreamweaver 8 to work right, and both are pretty much kindergarten requirements for membership in the societies in question.
It would be like being unable to understand something simple and straightforward like the discontents of structural anthropology, or the new historicism.
Or being unable to map the precession of the equinoxes in either mythic or mathematical form, to cite the example from Hamlet’s Mill that is for many of us the intermediate term between the technology of forest survival and the technology of survival in a digital culture.
note that I am in spite of myself talking about non-innovators mastering the basic moves of a given society. This was the trouble with American science education fifty years ago this week; it was, apparently, geared towards mastering the basics of how things like steam engines and jet airplanes work, rather than rethinking underlying principles and their eventual application to more practical ends. Then the appearance of the first orbiting artificial satellite sent legislators into a frenzy of throwing money at all manner of science programs that were wasted on those of us who figured out that we were reasonably good at interpreting texts, which nobody wanted to pay anything for and still do not.
The little exchange in the foregoing post about the trope from the Gospels, for example, does no more than confirm the process that Samuel Beckett summarized so memorably in Waiting for Godot (where either Vladimir or Estragon remembers his enforced childhood reading of the Bible in terms of the pretty colors of the maps of Palestine). And that thought could lead me off on a rehearsal of how that play summarized, for the postwar world of half a century ago, of the sense of the futility of religion and philosophy and the social sciences alike (Lucky’s speech of nonsensical intellectual fragments spewed forth at the demand of his entrepreneurial master, “Think, pig!”), and set forth the sad encounters of a society left stranded in a desolate landscape where raw power was occasionally viewed in its most unintentionally obvious forms.
But I won’t go there, although it vaguely segues into my discussion of the book that has occasioned this hopefully short post, viz., Shanny Peer’s France on Display: Peasants, Provincials, and Folklore in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. I’ve plunged into the latter pages, bypassing the Popular Front politics of the romanticization of regionalism. And am struck by Peer’s ability to produce insights about the counterpoint between folk regionalism and modernization in both left and right in the 1930s (and up to the present, one should add).
I haven’t been back to Paris to view the new ethnographic museum, which apparently is catching its own species of hell for exoticizing the contexts of world cultures, but one of the things that struck me about the old Musée de l’Homme was its proclivity to lump together cultures that for me didn’t belong in the same museum…Paleolithic rock carvings and Siberian shaman costumes and Ethiopian church frescoes sawn right out of the rock and exported to Paris. And, if I recall correctly, Eastern European dance costumes.
But until the 1937 opening of the Palais de Chaillot the folklore and customs of France had been included in that hodgepodge, the point being that any pre-Cartesian practices that couldn’t be enfolded into the onward march of civilization were to be grouped together as interesting primitive holdovers that ultimately belonged with the cave paintings. By the 1939 New York World’s Fair, the French Pavilion was celebrating regional customs and diversity for reasons other than promoting Depression-era tourism, just as the WPA travel guides produced in Roosevelt’s America were about more than promoting travel.
There was still an impulse towards producing a single French national narrative, just as there was an impulse towards producing a single American national narrative. But celebrating difference as contributing to unity was more than empty sentiment, though it had, and continues to have, unpredictable consequences.
I’ve written before in this blog about the ironies of the efforts of Vichy bureaucrats to promote the new triad of Work, Family and Homeland (or Fatherland, to use the gendered form of “Patrie”) in place of the old one of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood). In Indochina and in other colonies, the effort to marshal local traditions for the greater goals of Petain’s National Revolution ended up providing fresh anti-colonial fodder by providing regional substitutes for, say, Jeanne d’Arc. The impulse to celebrate the sons and daughters of the local soil ended up being as counterproductive as the use of the fabled standardized history textbook wherein the descendants of Martiniquais slaves read about “our ancestors, the Gauls.”
(Again, it’s the impossibly specialized title that leads the mind off in productively vast directions regarding cultural interactions: Eric T. Jennings’ Vichy in the Tropics: Pétain’s National Revolution in Madagascar, Guadeloupe, and Indochina, 1940-1944.)
Anyway, today we tend to have specialized scraps of popular culture alongside a few tales remembered from our grandparents as our collective cultural inheritance, but the dynamics of the interplay between local knowledge and (post)modern global information (or pseudo-information) proceeds along lines of force and tension that can be perceived in Peer’s narrative of how to present the stuff of the 1937 and 1939 world expositions.
And as I noted regarding Wade Davis’ Light at the Edge of the World, today we have not just re-enfolded folklore into that immense Museum of the Human Endeavor, but the world of information technology and media arts and all the rest of our contemporary enterprise. The creations of what Davis terms “a wildly inquisitive and astonishinglyh adaptive species” prove difficult to prise apart; the predictably delusional reactions of intercontinental investment analysts obey the same mental laws as the category mistakes of tribal hunters making their way through the malarial swamp, and the technological adaptations of those same hunters to the handful of available resources turn out to be as nuanced and inventive as the innovations of the writers of software. This is not the same thing as saying that some cultures are not more maladaptive than others, as anyone who has looked for more than five minutes at their own family dysfunctions will have realized.
That would lead, and did, into a now-erased digression about our inclination to oversimplify the individual and collective forces shaping any given group or individual’s destiny. But as I recall, I was originally talking about folklore and the changing contents of our inherited mental equipment, so maybe I should just stop with the observation that a self-critical look at the workings of any functional culture makes the more maladapted among us feel properly humble.
Some of us could no more detoxify manioc properly than we could get Dreamweaver 8 to work right, and both are pretty much kindergarten requirements for membership in the societies in question.
It would be like being unable to understand something simple and straightforward like the discontents of structural anthropology, or the new historicism.
Or being unable to map the precession of the equinoxes in either mythic or mathematical form, to cite the example from Hamlet’s Mill that is for many of us the intermediate term between the technology of forest survival and the technology of survival in a digital culture.
note that I am in spite of myself talking about non-innovators mastering the basic moves of a given society. This was the trouble with American science education fifty years ago this week; it was, apparently, geared towards mastering the basics of how things like steam engines and jet airplanes work, rather than rethinking underlying principles and their eventual application to more practical ends. Then the appearance of the first orbiting artificial satellite sent legislators into a frenzy of throwing money at all manner of science programs that were wasted on those of us who figured out that we were reasonably good at interpreting texts, which nobody wanted to pay anything for and still do not.
