Gauravonomics Blog

Grant McCracken on how to become a self-taught anthropologist –

If you choose to be a free standing anthropologist, there are two objectives: the culture below and the culture above. The culture below is the long standing ideas and assumptions with which we make the world make sense, the infrastructure, if you will, of thought and feeling. The culture above is the trends and innovations that pour through our world. We want culture above and below because too often anthropology is reduced to a kind of cool hunting, a search for the latest thing and an investigation of culture above. Certainly, we need to know what social networking is, but if that’s all we know, all we can report to the client, we have removed ourselves from usefulness.

More to the point, we have sacrificed our disciplinary advantage. Any undergraduate can pursue cool. Only an anthropologist can observe the larger, richer cultural context from which cool springs and with which it must correspond if cool is to cool into something lasting. Indeed I would argue that it is precisely when culture above resonates with the culture below that things “take,” that innovation has a chance to transform us in substantial ways. (And by this reckoning you could say that social networking is now finding its feet precisely because users have found a way to make it responsive to the logic of their social worlds. This is not to say it will not change these social worlds, but first it must find a way to resonate with them.)