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“Take Up Arms and Get Rid of the Guy”: Tom Head and the Conspiracy of Opinions
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...
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Mitt Romney and The Chinese “Slave Labor” Factory
In an interesting video posted this past Friday, Mitt Romney describes a Chinese factory he visited back in his days at Bain Capital. The video was posted on YouTube by someone apparently pretending to...
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Mystery Object #5: Totem of Emergency Protection +1
Today while leaving campus, as I have each day for ten years, I noticed a new addition to the campus topography. Just at the south edge of campus, between two dorms, was a giant dark brown pole with a...
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Rules to Enter Iowa
I was doing some office cleaning this past weekend when I stumbled upon an object I had collected on a road trip back in 2005—a list of “Rules to Enter Iowa” that I had ripped out of a local gazette in...
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An Apple is an Apple, Except When It’s a Sign of Satan
As an anthropology professor who regularly teaches classes dealing with material culture and issues of representation, every semester we discuss the ways that humans ascribe meanings to objects—reading...
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God(zilla) Will Destroy L.A.
Just a few days after the New Year, while in Los Angeles, we visited Hollywood Boulevard. While I don’t imagine the beautiful people do a lot of hanging around in that particular neighborhood, it is...
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The Day I Met Superman
Last November a film blog that I regularly read shared a short documentary video that touched me in an unexpected way. It featured Christopher Dennis, a guy whose alter ego is Superman on Hollywood...
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June 4, 1989: Report on Putting Down Anti-Government Riot
Last week while looking for a book on my bookshelf I happened upon a slim, blue-covered pamphlet wedged between two larger books. The moment I pulled it out I recognized it as something I hadn’t seen...
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“Welcome to Chinese Walmart”: Emailing Oriental Curiosities
Over the past few years a number of friends, colleagues and acquaintances have forwarded an interesting email to me. The email, usually titled “Welcome to Chinese Walmart” features a series of images...
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The Weight of Creation(ism)
“…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...
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Oriental Torture Cabinet
For folks in the Twin Cities the last weeks of August leading up to Labor Day is the time for the “Great Minnesota Get Together”—The Minnesota State Fair. Perhaps on of the only rituals truly shared by...
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Moon Nostalgia
This past week there have been quite a few articles focusing on the breakthroughs, accomplishments and historical firsts of the manned Apollo missions. Among my favorites are a recent article in Slate...
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Shen Yun Performing Arts as Falun Gong’s “Wild East Show”
This past week I went to my mailbox in the social sciences divisional office and was surprised to find every faculty mailbox had been stuffed to overflowing with a 2014 calendar of the Shen Yun dance...
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Elkader, Iowa and Pioneer Cosmopolitanism
This morning I was doing a bit of light reading and “Google map traveling” to follow up after our recent trip to Morocco. Mostly I was reading about the history of the African Maghreb, French...
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Ghosts in the City
This month I am finally whittling away at a few of the books in my pile. Among these is the second volume of The Practice of Everyday Life—Living and Cooking. I have been meaning to read it since...
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Shen Yun Buys The Front Page—Promises Authentic, Beautiful, Old “Culture”
As if junk mail spam-bombing college faculty and advertisements stuck up on community bulletin boards everywhere weren’t enough—this morning I awoke to find that the front page of our local community...
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What The Photograph Takes, What the Photograph Misses
Fujiazhuang Beach in Dalian presents a dizzying array of of activities and actions, social and personal trajectories of participation and involvement—all jostling up against one another on a small...
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Adjusting Floor Numbers to Avoid Bad Luck in a Chengdu Hotel
When I teach Introduction to Anthropology I often like to use simple examples to relativise taken-for-granted categories. “Common-sense” examples usually communicate these the best—so I might talk, for...
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Selling Lucky Telephone Numbers in Shanghai
“13661588868” “I want to bring forth wealth, wealth! I want fortune, fortune, fortuuunnneeee to arise! Let fortune flow!” While going through images on my office computer, I found some photos I shot...
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“Sing Red to Fight Darkness”: Chinese Urban Development as Apocalypse
“Yes, people are constructed by their material world, but often they are not themselves the agents behind that material world through which they must live” (Miller 2009: 84). “The apocalyptic describes...
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