Books | MUSEUM FATIGUE

In Defense of Serendipity, Some Notes

February 22, 2019 by Museum Fatigue

I’m too busy these days to have time for any kind of review of the books that I’m reading, but I have been wanting to post more on this blog and since I type notes up on my books anyway, I might as well share some of my comments and choice quotes. I encountered Sebastian Olma’s book, In Defense of Serendipity, through a reference in another book to the preface, “The Great Digital Swindle,” written by Mark Fisher. In Fisher’s preface he asks […]

Categories: Books • Tags: Mark Fisher, Repeater Books, Sebastian Olma, serendipity, Silicon Valley

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Keep Your Drones At Home

December 14, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

A few days ago some students stopped by my office to ask me about an email that they had all just received from the Dean of Students Office. The message announced a ban on the use of drones on campus. The sudden appearance of the all-campus message suggested that there had been an incident that precipitated the response. The students knew that my Digital Anthropology class has been doing some unusual final mini-projects this semester and were curious if the […]

Categories: Books, Play • Tags: drones, email, safety, security

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Utopia or Bust Is a Fine Guide to Our Present Crisis

February 2, 2015 by Museum Fatigue

This past December Verso had an incredible book sale—50% off everything and digital books at a fraction of their list price. To top it off, they did something that I wish every bookseller did—buy the book and get the digital book for free. The sale provided the excuse I needed to catch up on books I have been eager to read, such as Gabriella Coleman’s, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. While browsing, however, I also picked up […]

Categories: Books, Crisis, Review • Tags: Benjamin Kunkel, Boris Groys, David Graeber, David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Marxism, Robert Brenner, Slavoj Zizek, Utopia

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Patrick Wilken’s Biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss

May 8, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

I just finished a very enjoyable read—Patrick Wilcken’s biography Claude Levi-Strauss: The Father of Modern Anthropology. I picked it up used at a local Minneapolis Bookseller, Magers and Quinn late last week. Billed as “the first biography in English” of its subject, it was not something I could turn down. For years I have enjoyed teaching Tristes Tropiques in my Anthropology of Travel class—Pilgrims, Travelers and Tourists and I read some of his work in graduate school—but never really had an impression […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Nostalgia, Objects of Power • Tags: biography, Bororo, Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Mato Grosso, Musée du quai Branly, Patrick Wilcken, structural anthropology, Tristes Tropiques

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A Practical Science of the Singular

January 19, 2014 by Museum Fatigue

This morning I finally finished The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living and Cooking. I don’t have time to write a commentary, but did want to post some choice quotes from the short essay at the end by de Certeau reflecting on the study of everyday life, “A Practical Science of the Singular.” In the short essay his emphasis on culture as everyday human practice and creativity is clear—much of it a summary of points he made in the […]

Categories: Books, Consumption, Everyday Life, Photo Essays, Quotes • Tags: communication, culture, Luce Giard, Michel de Certeau, orality, practice, technology, The Practice of Everyday Life

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Old Red Books For Sale

October 24, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Categories: Books, China, Memory, Nostalgia • Tags: Cultural Revolution, Mao, Red Books, Taiyuan

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Protection in the Nuclear Age

September 7, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“In this uneasy age in which we live, strife abounds in many troubled parts of the world. The weapons of modern warfare have become increasingly powerful and numerous…In the face of this threat, a strong civil defense is needed not only throughout government, but on the part of the individual and the family.” In the final throes of preparing for this semester, while digging though some readings for a class, I came across a small booklet that I collected a […]

Categories: Books, End of Times, Gear, Memory, Mystery Objects, Retro • Tags: Civil Defense, civil preparedness, Department of Defense, fallout shelter, Fallout Shelter Design, Nuclear Age, Nuclear Attack, Survival

The Weight of Creation(ism)

August 31, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

“…it is an inherent characteristic of common-sense thought precisely to deny this and to affirm that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience, not deliberated reflections upon it…common sense rests its [case] on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority.”—Clifford Geertz, “Common Sense as a Cultural System” “Wherever we turn, there is the Face of God…” —Harun Yahya Last week a colleague of mine in the Religion […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Education, Mystery Objects, Mythologies, Religion • Tags: adnan oktar, Atlas of Creation, Clifford Geertz, common sense, Creation Museum, Creationism, Global Publishing, Harun Yahya, Richard Dawkins, weight

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On Becoming An Anthropologist (in 1970)

August 26, 2013 by Museum Fatigue

Last month, while doing some deep cleaning in our anthropology lab, I came across a small booklet titled On Becoming and Anthropologist: A Career Pamphlet For Students. Prepared by Walter Goldschmidt at UCLA, it was published by the American Anthropological Association in 1970. Its attractive burnt orange color, retro font, and the unidentified “ethnic symbol” on the cover caught my eye. I set it aside, thinking it might be a nice time capsule—a snapshot of what becoming an anthropologist was […]

Categories: Anthropology, Books, Retro, Scripts, Work • Tags: 1970, American Anthropological Association, career, pamphlet, students

An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

August 3, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

This summer I have spent a good amount of time reading widely, and even somewhat randomly, books that examine the sociocultural in a poetic or literary way. I have been searching for an ethnographic approach to rethink and rewrite my research on social memory and nostalgia in a way that addresses the contingent, contradictory, emergent and affective nature of memories both individual and collective. I began by revisiting some books from my grad school days by Michael Taussig, José Limón and […]

Categories: Books, Photo Essays • Tags: fieldwork, Paris, Perec, Place, Representation, travel