MUSEUM FATIGUE

“Take Up Arms and Get Rid of the Guy”: Tom Head and the Conspiracy of Opinions

August 23, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

I’m not even sure what to do with this video clip. The first time I watched it I was just stunned. When it ended, I promptly watched it again three or four times. There was no Onion watermark in the corner. It didn’t appear to be a hoax. It appears to be real and valuable ethnographic material—documenting a folk mythology that I find academically fascinating, albeit if also a touch terrifying. In the clip from a Fox television newscast, Texas […]

Categories: Mythologies, Politics, Random Reflections • Tags: conspiracy theories, government, politics, Tom Head

“Red Dawn: Death By China” or “Confronting The Red Communist-Totalitarian Job-Stealing Dragon”

August 18, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

I had been writing a reaction to the newly released movie trailer for the remake of the 1984 classic Red Dawn, when this morning I saw the trailer for Peter Navarro’s new documentary Death By China. Like a song that you can’t get out of your head, Death By China hijacked my thinking about Red Dawn. I couldn’t go on writing because whenever I wanted to think about Red Dawn, Death By China was already there. The films fused into a single film in my […]

Categories: Movies • Tags: China, Communism, Death By China, entertainment, movie trailer, peter navarro, Red Dawn

Mystery Object #4: Carnival Red Star Target

August 17, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Sometimes everyday things can suddenly be reinterpreted in entirely new ways. Take, for example, a simple paper target that I have had taped on my office door for the last two years… Never any good at games of chance and skill, carnival games have always made me feel like Charlie Brown when Lucy volunteers to hold the football: I entertain a moment of hope, only to have the ball ripped away at the last minute. Things were different one afternoon […]

Categories: Mystery Objects • Tags: Communism, Minnesota State Fair

Mystery Object #3: Snow Globes

August 10, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

I have a small collection of souvenirs collected on a shelf in my office. I they are not personal souvenirs, but a teaching collection that I use in a class I teach on the anthropology of travel: Pilgrims, Travelers, and Tourists. For this reason, I have tended to collect the most kitschy souvenirs I can find—souvenirs that scream, “I am a souvenir!” In other words, I have been collecting meta-souvenirs which reference their souvenir-ness more than the site where they were […]

Categories: Made in China, Mystery Objects, Tourism • Tags: Casablanca, China, Morocco, Paris, Rome, snow globe, souvenir, Susan Stewart, travel, vacation

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

The Mona Lisa: Art in the Age of Digital Consumption

August 3, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

The Mona Lisa is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable images in the world. Perhaps second only to the Eiffel Tower, it is an icon of the tourist experience of Paris. So, when we arrived at the Louvre with thousands of other tourists, of course, the first thing we did was go to see it. I have heard that often when tourists first see the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre, the portrait is much smaller than they expect. The idea, […]

Categories: Museums, Random Reflections, Tourism, Video clips, Visual Anthropology • Tags: art, Mona Lisa, Photography, Pierre Bourdieu, tourism, visual anthropology, Walter Benjamin

Michel de Certeau’s Grave

August 2, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

A few weeks ago, while making plans for a last-minute trip to Paris, I spent some time working my way through the long list of possible things to see and do on a trip of about eight days. My wife and I were going to count on Rick Steves to get us through the basics—The Louvre, Versailles, The Eiffel Tower, etc—but I really wanted to take advantage of the trip to see things related to my academic interests. Since I […]

Categories: Photo Essays • Tags: graves, Michel de Certeau

An Afternoon Lunch at the Zhiqing Villa

June 27, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

Ten years ago this month I finished my PhD dissertation, “Remembering Red: Memory and Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution in Late 1990s China,” in the anthropology department at the University of Washington in Seattle. My dissertation research examined nostalgia and memory of the Cultural Revolution among members of the generation who were most active in it. Specifically I looked at memorial practices of former “educated youth” or zhiqing who were sent down to the Chinese countryside beginning in the fall of […]

Categories: Fieldwork, Video clips • Tags: chinese countryside, food, nostalgia, video, zhiqing

United Airlines: The Food of the Future is Now

June 24, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

I don’t sleep well on long airplane flights. I usually stay awake through the whole thing and keep myself busy by reading, writing, watching movies and thinking. After twelve hours in the air I usually get pretty antsy and a bit punchy from lack of sleep. Often in my head I replay parts of Louis Black’s funny monologue about his airplane flight to New Zealand. Sometimes, however, in the final hours of the flight—when I have no endurance left and […]

Categories: Food, Random Reflections • Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, airplane meals, David Graeber, food, future, Hipstamatic, Science Fiction, soylent, soylent green, United Airlines

Jinling Buddhist Publishing House (金陵刻经处)

June 21, 2012 by Museum Fatigue

This morning I was invited by some of the folks that have been helping me with my research to go on a trip to visit the Jinling Buddhist Publishing House (jinling kejing chu) in downtown Nanjing. I can’t really say that I am that interested in ancient Buddhist texts, but I was looking forward to seeing how they carve the wooden blocks, print and bind books in the classical way. It takes nearly a month to carve one panel and […]

Categories: Museums, Video clips • Tags: Buddhism, buddhist texts, China