A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: "How Come She’s in the Club?"

 

There is, and some might find this interesting, something, using the language many social media “kiddies” use today, something “ewww" and “weird” about reaction videos to television shows on YouTube and in academic bureaucracies. The something that is “eww” and “weird” or interesting and fascinating about them is that one can argue compellingly that they are both forms of reader response criticism.

They are both forms of reader response because both amateur responses to television shows on YouTube and professional academic crystal ball textualism, a form of textual analysis that largely eschews any documentary evidence beyond the text as important, to television shows (and film and literature) are both similar in that they both are equally grounded in a kind of ideology of fundamentalist literalism, namely that all you need is the text in order to understand any given television show. (or film or piece of literature). They are both, in other words, limited in scope.

Now don’t get me wrong, I do understand that there are differences between amateur and professional reactions. Amateur reactors and their reactions don’t have the theoretical, methodological, and interpretive depth and sophistication (varying degrees of cultural capital) professional reactors and their reactions do. They largely fail, as a consequence, to explore important economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects about the text under ethnographic observation. Amateur reactions generally do not ask about how the industrial and corporate structure of Hollywood, for instance, impacts how a given television show is made, about the compromises auteurs have to make to get their television shows funded and on the air, and how auteurs can sneak more marginal cultural forms into a text, particularly if they are of the science fiction or fantasy genre. Like the Soviet censors of yore, Hollywood’s standards and practises suits appear to have a blind spot when it comes to some things. Academic reactors are more attuned to such questions, though not entirely, sometimes they seem to think that economic contexts aren’t that important, and ask such questions even though their analyses are problematic given their blind spot for primary source materials beyond the text making their approach a kind of donut hole approach to empirical phenomena. They may ask the right questions and get, on occasion, the right answers but their is something missing from their analyses, namely, the primary source material beyond the text that would add heft to their arguments and allow for sound scientific replication on the basis of evidence beyond the text.

There are other aspects particularly of amateur reaction videos on social media that are interesting as well. I have written about and explored other aspects of amateur reaction videos in other posts focusing on social media on this site. One I haven’t focused on extensively is how reactors react to the introduction of new characters into a television show. For instance, in season or series five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (see “Buffy vs. Dracula” and “The Real Me”) a new character who we have never seen of or heard of before is introduced into the Buffyverse, Buffy’s sister Dawn. Dawn is a fourteen year old teenager, which means she is annoying to those of an emotional and proprietary bent, by definition. Viewers have no idea who she is. Is she Buffy’s sister who has never been mentioned or who we may have heard of but forgotten about? Is she a demon, the Big Bad of season five who is doing something bad to Buffy’s mother Joyce in order to weaken Buffy?

Many of the reactors have those initial reactions to the introduction of Dawn to the series (for examples of reactions to Dawn see the Horror Bandwagon, SofieReacts, TheLexieCrowd. Fan Theory, VicFrost, cass reacts, Dakara, George Alexander, alley box, domi e, Liam Catterson, Jules Reacts, After Show Reacts, Liam Duke, The Normies, JayPeaKay, DodoReactions, for example). Few of them, despite the fact that an episode that showed how the manipulation of space and time can change things in season four called“Superstar”, grasp the admittedly somewhat arcane obvious about Dawn, that she may be the product of something akin to what Jonathan did in that episode, this despite the fact that they must be familiar with how Buffy has manipulated its viewers and played with its text in reflexive ways before throughout its run. Most of the reactors, in fact, have little sympathy and empathy for Dawn and some even immediately dislike Dawn wondering why she, as Willow asked when Jenny Calendar became a sometime member of the Scooby Gang in season one’s “Prophecy Girl", a curious reaction to a show that privileges outsiders and rails against insider cliques. Some of them, like VicFrost, even express their dislike of Dawn yelling at their screens within their screen querying why she is here thinking she must be evil, something, admittedly, the writers and actors play with as a red herring, something again most Buffy viewers should be used to by season five.

It is not until the fifth episode of season five (a way to build Hitchcockian suspense and anticipation in viewers) that reactors learn who Dawn really is, namely, a ball of mystical energy, a key, that opens portals to other dimensions, something that raises further questions in the process. At this point some reactors like SofieReacts feel a bit guilty about their previous unsympathetic and un-empathetic feelings toward Dawn, something many initial viewers of the series did not and even expressed this hatred for whining Dawn at “Once More With Feeling" sing-alongs at the Alamo Draft House in Austin, Texas, something that is a pretty stark reminder about the real life behaviour of some human beings toward others of their same ilk. 

All of this, of course, raises the question of what these reactions say about us, about us humans, in general in real life? Personally, to go all homiletic and social ethical on you, I don’t think it says much that is good about the human species. But then life amongst core nation humans has made me cynical (or realistic) about them. 

The Cultural Therapeutics of Losing My Religion

 

I have been reading a several books on film and television recently along with the curated film festivals on John Ford and others I have been recently doing. In particular, I have been reading several books on what is easily my favourite American television show—a kind of backhanded comment given that I don’t find most American TV shows worth watching—Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other television shows created by Joss Whedon.

The most recent book on the television worlds of Joss Whedon I have been reading is The Psychology of Joss Whedon edited by Joy Davidson and published by Dallas based BenBella books. Amongst the interesting essays by various social scientists in this collection is an autobiographical one by Stephanie DeLuse, an essay that stimulated me to follow her example and explore how I lost one of my traditional religions, though i was only marginally devoted to it in the first place, just as she lost hers.

DeLuse writes about her upbringing in a Christian fundamentalist religion in her essay “More Than Entertainment’ in the book. She explores the minuses of such an upbringing. She mentions that were positives but doesn’t make these explicit. Perhaps it was a focus on ethics if an authoritarian ethics and morality.  This community—she doesn’t note which fundamentalist Christian group it was though I suspect it was not Mormon fundamentalism as polygamy, which is central to sectarian Mormon fundamentalist groups is not implied whatsoever—was, she writes, authoritarian patriarchal, paternalistic, ethnocentric, apocalyptic, and manichean. It was an authoritarian group which convinced if not coerced her to marry a 26 year old patriarch when she was 17 and which had negative impacts on her health (mental? physical? both?), impacts that eventually forced her to leave the community and face shunning, a shunning she still faces today from the group.

One of the things Deluse notes was that she was not allowed to, in this authoritarian social group, watch television, particularly television of a “nefarious” sort like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, both of which the faith defined as “occult” and hence evil. For this faith such television was worldly and wicked and hence verboten. Paradoxically, television, in the form of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, would prove to be healing balm for the scars that fundamentalist Christianity left on her body and her mind. It made her think, think about women’s roles in society, about misogyny, and about social ethics and morality.

I was not brought up in any Christian fundamentalist, evangelical, liturgical, or mainstream religion at all. The Dallas I grew up in—Big D was only one of the places I lived in my youth—was dominated by the Southern Baptists and the Methodists, the former perceived as conservative, the latter as liberal—but I was neither nor were my parents. My religion was, if only briefly and without much depth to it, Americanism and Texasism, the religions which preached the gospel of American and Texas greatness (second to none), manicheanism (we good, they bad), messianism (we are on a mission from god), apocalypticism (utopia is coming to the America and Texas near you), and compassionate (if, of course, converts accepted the gospel of America and Texas). I recall feeling briefly proud of being a Texas as I sat in my Texas civics class in junior high and reflected on the brilliant words to the Texas national hymn, “Texas Our Texas".

It really didn’t take me long to lose this faith. The war in Vietnam was the initial agent of change. It was a war I eventually came to realise was based on a series of lies: lies about the dangers of communism to the US (the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were, of course, primarily nationalists), lies about dominos falling, likes about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, and the lie that the US was not the latest in a long line of imperial great powers. With the proper empirically grounded scepticism in place I soon realised that the US was grounded it lies: lies that it was democratic (it is, as is almost always the case with great powers and beyond, oligarchic), lies about its economic system (the lie that it is great for everyone; it is good, of course, for the oligarchs), lies that it was a beacon to the rest of the world (the lie that its messianic mission was to spread “democracy” and that it was protecting democracy by its police actions all around the world), and lies that it was the most moral nation on earth (tell that to those collaterally damaged by America’s war machine, political system, economic system, and cultural system).Unlike DeLuse, for whom Buffy was therapeutic, it helped her think her way through her sometimes difficult situation and helped heal her as she went through this process, my therapy was history, sociology, and the knowledge music, like that of the Beatles and the Stones, and films, like Dr. Stangelove, brought to my consciousness.

Faith in and worship of the United States and Texas weren’t the only things my escape from a fundamentally and inhterently hateful faith brought me (the US is ethnocentric as are all human groups and what they have wrought). I also, over time, recognised the fallacies associated with the ideologies these religions had about human beings. Many, if not most human beings, drawing on a Christian cultural script similar to the manichean and apocalypiic good versus evil and virgin versus whore ones that have had an immense impact on Western culture (including Islam which has its own iterations of these), the saint versus sinner binary, tend to divide human beings into saints on the one side of the accounting page and sinners on the other. Of course, human beings in general, are neither saints nor sinners. They are, in fact, both. Take the recent case of Buffy’s creator, Joss Whedon. 

Whedon, like America and Texas, has been accused of being a hypocrite, of shilling for feminism while cheating on his wife. Like America and Texas, who are perhaps more whores than adulterers, he has been accused of adultery (something unlike many adulterers he has admitted to) and harassing behaviour on set, which I assume means he was dictatorially demanding (something that comes with the territory of director, military commander, football coach). Unlike America and Texas, however, he has been shunned by pots and kettles living in glass houses. Humans, you see, just like nation-states like the US, are tried and true hypocrites.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Whedon’s weaknesses should be ignored. I am simply noting that those self-righteous, self-serving, and vengeance seeking individuals who are whinging about Whedon’s behaviours, such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Charisma Carpenter, and Marti Noxon, have, I am certain, similar skeletons in their own closet. I should also, while I am here, note the similarities between those who watched the Shoah happen without doing much, bear some similarities to those who, in the soap opera that is human life and existence, try to straddle the fence trying not to offend anyone in the process.

The Vietnam War was not the only thing that made me question my religion and heal from it. Cultural Anthropology also made me sceptical of religion and made me recognise that not only nation-states are fallible but so are humans. I learned from Cultural Anthropology that humans have had, over the course of human history, among other things, varying marriage systems, varying conceptions of when marriage is acceptable, and varying sexual practises, all of which function to do one of the things all of these function to do (increasing the age of marriage is functional in a demographically growing world), replicate the species. I learned that notions of what is “deviant” are often if not generally social and culturally constructed and that deviance serves the function of socialising for conformity in most cultures, in showing the masses what not to do if they want to get along and what to do if they don't. I learned that adultery is common, that sexual “deviance” is common, and that hypocrisy is omnipresent in the human species. I learned, in other words, to question political, economic, and cultural authority and developed, in the process, a healthy dislike of, for example, paternalism, patriarchalism, patronisation, bureaucracies, and hypocrisies of all flavours.

And it is here—the commonplaceness of, the widespread reality of “sin”—that one has to ground one’s understanding of the human species on and one’s social ethics on. We have to understand, in other words, that humans are fallible, that human criticisms of human weakness is a socialisation for conformity process and that it is often if not always hypocritical, and that we have to accept human beings for what they are and what they always will be not what we wish they could be (utopian ideologies are almost always dangerous and hazardous to human health). Now don’t get me wrong, human weakness runs along a continuum. There is a massive difference between, for example, Adolf Hitler and Joss Whedon though one wonders if his groupies turned haters grasp this anymore than they grasp their own hypocrisies. 

Being a life long and professional “deviant", of course, has brought much pain—being the “deviant" has its drawbacks including shunning and isolation including in the academy that vaunted (if mythical) bastion of freedom of though—but it has also brought much pleasure, pleasure that, to some extent, compensates for the trials and tribulation of outsiderness. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

The Books of My Life: The Searchers (Buscombe)

 

As I came to know more and more about film in my teenage years and to understand that there were some films that were considered classics and some directors who were considered to put out classic film after classic film, I came to look for certain films on television and at second run theatres, the latter after I went up to university.

There were several films that I wanted to see that were hard for me to find so they became films I really wanted to see. After I became interested in the work of Howard Hawks, for instance, I looked especially hard for Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (I was also, by this time, an appreciator of the work of Barbara Stanwyck and made every effort to watch any film with her in it) and Twentieth Century, both of which I was finally able to see if only once on television. And I looked especially hard for John Ford’s The Searchers, which I too was finally able to see on television in those dark age days before the advent of the VCR and later the DVD. Blu ray, and 4k disc.

The first time I saw The Searchers I was unimpressed. At the time I chalked my moderately negative attitude towards the film up to the very high expectations I had for the film given its critical reputation. The second time I saw the film—again if memory serves on television, on television in the days where widescreen VistaVision films like The Searchers were sadly and badly shrunk into the academy frame doing injustice to it—I was much more impressed with the film and could understand why many considered it not only a classic but one of the best films ever made, something made flesh by the Sound and Sight poll of filmmakers and film critics of their favourite films. It is still number 13 in the most recent poll of 2022, an iteration of the poll that bears the marks of a greater attention to female filmmakers. 

The third time I saw the film was this week. I watched it on DVD this time around, the Warner Brothers (easily the worst studio producer of DVD’s on the market) “Ultimate Collector’s Edition” DVD of the film, a DVD which is in the correct aspect ratio but which doesn't sadly gives viewers the option of listening to the film's soundtrack in the original mono, something any quality producer that cares about history (fat chance these days) would give us. The film looked pretty good in DVD format though the reviewer of the transfer of the film at the wonderful DVDBeaver found it somewhat wanting. The “Universal Collector’s Edition” was accompanied by a lovely reproduction of the comic book produced for the film’s marketing campaign and some lovely reproduced theatre cards, both of which made the lack of a mono track and the good but not great transfer even more annoying. Anyway, the third time I watched the film, this time during my John Ford film festival, I responded more to the film as a historian and a social scientist than as a fanboy or fangirl. I ended up finding it interesting and appreciated it as a consequence particularly for what it told us about the cultural contexts of the era in which it was made.

Seeing the film again stimulated me to read, Edward Buscombe’s monograph on the film, The Searchers (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics series, 2000). The monograph follows the same strategy as Western film specialist Buscombe’s excellent monograph on another John Ford film, Stagecoach. Buscombe, while he is summarising and analysing the meaning of the film text, takes readers on a journey into the production, distribution, and exhibition of the film just as he did in is monograph on Stagecoach. The only major difference between what Buscombe did in that monograph and what he did in his monograph on The Searchers was that in The Searchers he made greater use of psychoanalytic theory, something Buscombe deems appropriate in a film impacted by the social, cultural, and psychological darkness of American film noir, something that also impacted, as Buscombe notes, the Westerns of director Anthony Mann—the director of several of my favourite Westerns, a genre I am not as into as I was when I was younger—who directed film noirs before he directed Westerns and it shows. As such, the utilisation of psychoanalytic approaches to literary and film art makes more sense than its fetishisation by many contemporary film scholars given its increasing impact on American intellectual culture in the post-World War II era.

For some reason, a reason I can’t precisely put my finger on, I preferred Buscombe’s monograph on Stagecoach to his monograph on The Searchers. Perhaps it was the fact that the first time Buscombe’s approach seemed sensible if not revelatory while the second time it appeared somewhat repetitive particularly since I read both monographs one after the other in a short period of time. That said, I had and have no doubt that like Buscombe’s monograph on The Searchers, like his monograph on Stagecoach, should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the film, in the work of John Ford, and in the history of American film.

Did Buscombe, who claims that The Searchers is one of the greatest of films ever made, convince me that The Searchers was one of the greatest films ever made? No. It is, however, as Buscombe notes, interesting for its magnificent compositions, something Ford was expert at, for its use of Monument Valley as a character, for Ford's meaningful punctuations of the film with significant camera movements, and for its noirish and almost nightmarish portrayal of American racism embodied by John Wayne’s character Ethan (Ford’s sympathies seem to lie with Marty, the “half breed” character Jeffrey Hunter plays), and for its somewhat “fakish" fairy tale ending. Just as Buscombe’s book on The Searchers is worth reading the film is definately worth watching. Perhaps it and the book on it can teach us a little something about American myths, American legends, American racism, and American imperialism.

The Books of My Life: Stagecoach (Buscombe)

 

Recently, thanks to retirement, I have been watching a lot of movies and television shows from my substantial, actually my way too substantial given the size of my flat, DVD and blu ray collection. Just last week, for instance, I ended a Gillian Armstrong film festival and began a John Ford film festival.

Watching the filmed work of noted and celebrated directors is not something new to my viewing pleasure, my not so viewing pleasure, or my viewing displeasure. One of the first films I ever watched, for example, was a film of Alfred Hitchcock’s of whom my recently departed father was a fan and who allowed my sister and me to watch the film because he thought we would like it. We did and his allowing to watch The Birds set my sister and me on a film watching life course that has lasts to this day. Both of us remain inveterate film watchers.

Sometime in my teens my film watching became more oriented to directors than to genres and stars. My sister, on the other hand, remains more oriented in her avid film watching to genre—the Western—and stars—John Wayne in particular—than mine. No doubt this was because my sister and I grew up in an era when Hollywood, Hollywood film stars, and certain Hollywood genres ruled the roost. Westerns, film Westerns and television Westerns, were still a big deal in the sixties when my sister Cindy and I came of film watching age in the mid-1960s and Hollywood stars were the biggest draw in bringing bodies into cinemas all across North America. 

I soon learned, however, particularly after I left for college—a defining moment in my relationship with my sister and in my life—where I gravitated toward others who were also film heads or cinephiles and took a few film classes, and learned that the work of certain directors was worth seeking out. I learned, for example, not only that Hitchcock’s film work beyond The Birds, was interesting in general and worth seeking out, but also that the film work of Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Joseph Mankiewicz, and a host of European art cinema directors like Ingmar Bergman, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and others like John Ford and Gillian Armstrong were worth paying attention to as well. I came of intellectual age, in part, in the age where the film director, well a few film directors, were regarded as auteurs, as authors of a film, after all. As you can see by my film festival format I still feel the same way though today though I do realise that performers like the Marx Brothers and even writers and music might be auteurs too.

Stimulated by my recent auteurist film watching festivals I decided to pick up several monographs on film auteurs to read. So, after I rewatched Stagecoach and listened to the commentaries on the Criterion and Warner Brothers DVD’s I owned  by noted scholars Jim Kitses, author of the highly regarded monograph Horizons West, and Scott Eyman, who wrote a highly regarded biography of Ford, I picked up and read Edward Buscombe’s excellent BFI monograph on John Ford’s film Stagecoach (London: BFI, BFI Film Classics, 1992). I am glad I did.

Buscombe’s monograph on Stagecoach is almost everything one could hope for in a brief work on a film classic. In between summarising the film and exploring the meaning of the film and its mise-en-scene Buscombe tells us about the life, career, and film strategies of John Ford. He explores the history of the Western in its literary and film forms. He tells us about the production aspects of the film. He tells us about the promotion campaign for the film. He tells us how much the film earned upon release. He writes about the casting of the film. He tells us about the themes of Ford’s Westerns, of which there are many, and of his film work in general (I am particularly fond of Ford's pokes at moral guardians like the temperance league). He tells us about Ford’s use of folk and folk like tunes in his films, tunes that sometimes provided themes for the characters in his films. He tells us something about the historical and cultural contexts the film draws on from both the past and from the 1939 and thereabouts present of the film. He tells us something about the contemporary and historical reception of the film. Buscombe’s Stagecoach is thus everything an excellent guide to a classic film should be and can be.

Watching Stagecoach and reading Buscombe’s outstanding monograph on the film foregrounded for me something I have sensed for some time, namely, that how we watch films and how we view or see them changes with time, age, and education. I was, for example, in my younger film watching days, raised on nationalist and Texas nationalist robbery. Then the Vietnam War came along and nutted me with reality forcing me to become much more sceptical and critical than I was before of the American nationalist and Texas nationalist ideologies I had been socialised for conformity into. I began, as a consequence, to look at America or American films differently than in the naive way I used to. The American Westerns I grew up enjoying as pure entertainments I suddenly realised were, in many cases, the embodiment of an American manifest destiny ideology, the embodiment of the American White man’s burden ideology, the embodiment of the ideology of American chivalric masculinity, and the embodiment of the American fear of the wild savage whoever that wild savage happened to be—commies when I was a young lad. Today I am no longer embedded within such nationalist religious bubbles and I am, as a consequence, much more critical of the cultural fabric woven into American films and American genre films like the Western and its ancestors.

As a consequence I no longer watch an American film, an American Western, or a John Ford film the way I used to. That doesn’t mean I no longer have an aesthetic appreciation for certain Westerns. Like Buscombe I recognise the qualities of Ford and his work including Ford's wonderful eye for composition, the wonderful ambiguity Ford felt, on occasion, toward America and the myths and myth making at the heart of the imagined American nationalist politically and ideologically correct enterprise, Ford’s limited use of close-ups to make narrative points, his emphasis on the gestures of his actors for expressing meanings in his films, and Ford’s use of comedy amidst drama and tragedy for effect, something that Ford drew from Shakespeare and something that I think, particularly in retrospect from the vantage point of 2020s, is not as successful as I thought it was when I was much younger. 

As I have grown older I have become much more choosy about the films and television programmes I like and watch.  I still like. the work of Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut, Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Firefly—both of which meld tonal variations much more successfully than Ford—and the films Valerie and Her Week of Wonders and WR: Mysteries of the Organism. I am, however, less and less enamoured of the films of Ford—too much stereotyped and caricatures farce, too much sentimentality (I prefer the sentimentality of a Capra to a Ford)—though I still have fond memories of his Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, Rio Grande, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and Howard Hawks, the subject of an upcoming film festival which will undoubtedly result in more re-evaluations, than I was when I was younger. I have come to realise that my notions of who is in the pantheon of film authors and the films I really like changes, just as does life in general.

The Books of My Life: History and the Media

 

Ever since the advent of historical documentaries on television, something that arguably began in Great Britain with the BBC’s 26 part documentary on World War I titled The Great War in 1964, professional historians have debated the quality of television history. For at least some academic historians, television histories, be they the lecture style, the presenter style, or the you are there form of television history, have a number of inherent problems. They are, some maintain, too image oriented. They are too selective. They make too much use of “historical” reconstructions. They simplify historical, theoretical, and methodological complexities way too much often in the service of seeking a wider audience, something that is always pressing when it comes to television including public television particularly these days. They too often focus on wars.

The fact of the matter, however, is that many television histories are done with the assistance of professional historians, as was the case with The Great War and many others since, and some have even been presented by academic historians themselves, though this hasn’t resulted in a diminishment in the number of those criticising the genre for its supposed simplification and in some cases, perversion of history. Given this it should not be a surprise that not all professional, let alone amateur historians, agree with the negative assessment of television history, something the papers contained in David Cannadine’s edited collection History and the Media (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England: Palgrave, 2004), a collection of papers presented at a conference on the media and history in London along with a couple of essays reproduced from magazines, point up. For many of the contributors to this collection television history is not inherently ahistorical or anti-historical. For many of these commentators television history is no more or less selective and manipulated than traditional history with its emphasis on the written word. For them the quality of history depends not on whether histories are in written form or not, but on the quality of the history including the television history.

The contributions to History and the Media can be divided thematically into several utlimately ideal types. There are the essays by television insiders which explore the history of television history such as those by Taylor Downing and Roger Smither who tries to the answer to the question as to why so many television histories have focused on war. There are the essays by professional historians like Simon Schama and Ian Kershaw, the two essays that were originally published in magazines, which explore the problems of television histories while offering defences of the BBC television histories they presented, A History of Britain in Schama’s case, or worked on, The Nazis: A Warning from History in Kershaw’s case. There are the essays by those amateur historians responsible for noted television histories of the past including that of Jeremy Isaacs, one of those responsible for what some consider the zenith of television history (me included), the 26 part The World at War a television history of World War II commissioned by ITV and broadcast in 1973, and that of Melvin Bragg, who reflects on his role in the making of and presenting of The Adventure of English from 2003 for the BBC. There is the essay by Max Hastings which raises questions about the genre of television history itself while simultaneously ruminating on the cultural reasons for why so many academics envy those professionals and amateurs who make television histories. There are the somewhat tangential essays by Jean Seaton on approaches to the history of broadcasting, David Puttnam on Hollywood’s special effects laden simplifications and perversions of reality, and John Tusa’s on the need to create a culture of authenticity and truth in broadcast organisations. 

Speaking of authenticity, while some of the essays in the collection do explore the manipulative techniques television histories use to tell their tale, techniques such as historical reconstructions, images and iconography, editing, music, and selectivity, for example, none, and this is not surprising given the fetishising cultures of the historical and journalistic professions, take this to its logical reflexive endpoint, namely to the fact that no television history or documentaries in general for that matter, can and do capture reality or real life. All television histories and documentaries, just like fictional films and fictional television programmes, may represent reality, they may be naturalistic including emotionally naturalistic, but they can’t be real because they are inherently selective and because they use editing, mise-en-scene, and music to manipulate time, space, perspective, and emotions in viewers contrary to the claims expectations of many professionals and amateurs for whom all art should and must be “real". Of course, in reality audiences, particularly lowest common denominator audiences, would be bored to death by a live stream of the real daily lives of any selected someones. Many of them instead genuflect before the altar of that most unreal of movie forms, superhero movies, a genre that includes virtually all films focusing on crime fighters and the military these days. Needless to say, the need many have for fantasy pervades a lot of historical documentaries today as well as fictional books, films and television shows, documentaries that feed their audiences appetite for a history they can be proud of whether it if of the formulaic we did it or the formulaic we are going to do it happy ending variety. The only genre of history documentaries that comes in for this kind of reflexive treatment are the you are there historical documentaries like 1900 House which are regarded by those commentators who bother to comment on them at all as unredeemable, as fundamentally not real television history. 

I enjoyed the essays in History and the Media immensely. I learned a lot from them, thought a lot about what they said, and was ultimately entertained by all of them. I recommend this admittedly only somewhat coherent collections of essays to anyone interested in the intersections between media and history, history and the media.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: That’s the Sound of One Hand (Trustpilot) Washing the Other (Labyrinth Books)

 

It is always fascinating to look behind the corporate curtain to see how digital age capitalism actually works. I had this pleasure recently when I tried to review a recent encounter I had with Labyrinth Books online on the Danish owned review site Trustpilot.

I tried to post this review of Labyrinth Books on Trustpilot: 

 "I ordered some books from Labyrinth Books. I had enough to get free shipping which was critical in my ordering the books. When I got the books two were missing. When I contacted Labyrinth and asked them for a revised bill which they never sent before I asked for it (bad form) I discovered I was charged for shipping because they did not have the two books I ordered and which, with the other books, gave me free shipping. CatchLabyrinth22."

I contacted Labyrinth about this, about not informing me that they did not have two books I ordered and that this meant I had to pay almost $9 dollars in shipping now. They wrote back telling me sorry, boy, you are shite out of luck and that if I wanted to send the books back I had to pay shipping. Apparently, Labyrinth’s policy is screw the customer...twice if you can. My response was what it should be: cancel my account, delete my account, I will never order from you again, and I will be filing a complaint about you with the attorney general of the state of New York. Have a good day.”

I dutifully created an account (I had posted before but by invitation of Thriftbooks previously when no account was required), signed in, and posted this review. A day or two letter, however, I got a since disappeared missive from the digital courtiers of the dukes and barons at Trustpilot telling me they could not post my review. Whether this corporation  has stupid bots doing this weeding out of reviews to try to discern fake ones from “real” ones is immaterial given that bots are written by humans and humans are known not only for their stupidity and moronicity but also their technology as utopia hubris.  Nor does it relieve them of responsibility for washing their hands of such censorship though I am sure they hope and think it does.

So regardless of the reason for deep sixing my review it amounts to censorship, of one hand, the muddied of Trustpilot, washing away empirical criticism of another dirty hand, Labyrinth Books. And that is the world of Big Brother Corporation ladies and gentlemen, a world which snake oil salesmen and con men predominate everywhere including online.

Addendum: When I contacted Trustpilot via Facebook message—they have disabled any other option—I felt like I had wondered into Green Acres and The Twilight Zone. When the operative who I was communicating with could not,  presumably, hopefully, after reading the above, could not discern the two paragraphs of my review in the body of the post which, presumably, a bot fuhrered and disallowed, I copied and pasted the review so they could read it. I then asked them why the post was disallowed. They couldn’t even give me a straight answer as to why it was placed in the brave new digital world rubbish bin. If this is Big Brother it is Big Brother as post-baby boom attention deficit disorder farce. Realising that I had gone down the rabbit hole where I had run into Lisa Douglas I departed as quickly as I could for saner shores.

Life as Crisis Management: The Labyrinth Books Kiada

 

I used to like Labyrinth Books, the Princeton, New Jersey shop that sells books both in their brick and mortar store and online. In fact, when I was in the City, which I was quite in the late nineties and early 2000s staying in a flat in Chelsea, I used to wonder up to their store near Columbia University. It was not the best used or new bookstore I have ever been in in the City, in North America, in Europe,  in Australia, or in New Zealand. But it was a decent a middling bookstore.

Then I got to know this firm. And familiarity, as the Chills note, sometimes definitely breeds, under the right empirical circumstances, contempt.

And the right empirical circumstances there have been. I have bought books online from Labyrinth on a couple of occasions. It went fine. Recently, however, I learned that if one bought over $100 dollars worth of books from them one received free shipping. So I dutifully put books in my shopping queue and eventually had enough books at the right cost to get the free shipping. So I ordered the items.

I got a communique from Labyrinth telling me the books had shipped. There was no indication that there was any change to my order so I rationally and reasonably assumed they were the books I ordered. When I got the books, however, the box was missing two items I had ordered and I quickly discovered that I had been charged around $9 dollars in shipping because, in a kind of capitalist catch-22, two of the items I ordered were out of stock. 

I contacted Labyrinth and asked why I was not contacted about this change in my order. They essentially implied that why should we? I responded with the logical riposte: because the order changed and as a consequence there was a change in the charges. Other bookstores, I noted, such as Midtown Scholar, a far superior bookshop to Labyrinth, for example, contacted me, as they should have, to note that a book described as “very good” was actually “good” and did I still want it at a discount? Given this, I responded by saying well then I will ship the books back and could they send me a pre-paid mailing label since it was their fault that the items were not in stock and their responsibility to let me know that the order had changed? They essentially told me tough luck kid. We don’t do that sort of thing here at King Labyrinth Books. They essentially, in doing this, told me that we are going to screw you not only once by by not telling you that there had been a change in the order and do you still want the books, twice by adding a shipping fee, and yet a third time by not paying themselves for a return of items I would never had chosen to receive if I knew a shipping charge would be added. Caveat emptor to the third power.

Since then I have asked them to refund me the shipping charge. It was their fault I was sent an order I no longer wanted, after all. They deigned not even to respond to such a plebeian request which, I presumed, meant a refusal even to consider such a thing. I then asked to delete my account. It took me three emails to finally get them to do this. Next, I asked them to take me off their mailing list. It took only one email to get them to do this. They also told me never to contact them again, which may have been due, in part, to the fact that I accurately described their firm as a skanky and slaggy con-corporation run by snake oil salesmen. The truth sometimes hurts, I guess, doesn’t it.

Postscript: As I suspected the Attorney General of New York, who I filed a formal complaint with about the immoral, never do the right thing, and hence skanky and slaggy corporation—skanky and slaggy being not slurs but empirical facts relating to this corporation and its skanky and slaggy behaviour— could do little to rectify the skanky and slaggy behaviour toward me of Labyrinth Books. The NYAG can only mediate. They suggested I take Labyrinth to small claims court, something I intend to look into. I intend to sue them for as much as I can for the emotional and financial damage this corporation has done to me, $400 or $500 dollars perhaps. I will also, of course, ask the court not only for shipping charges but also for time spent working on this issue at $50 to $75 dollars an hour—I reckon somewhere around $200 dollars total—and for court fees and costs.

On a sociological and ethnographic level what I find so interesting and fascinating is that used booksellers like Labyrinth, in the age of digital media and skanky and slaggy capitalism, have drunk deeply at the wells of conmen and snake oil salesman. Far too many used booksellers these days, for example, inadequately and inaccurately describe the used books they have for sale because, presumably, selling an item is more important to them than describing it accurately. Labyrinth is actually pretty good at describing what their used books actually look like (very good, good, acceptable). Where Labyrinth falls down is in what I described above. Apparently, because they want to sell books or need to sell books they don’t tell customers when an order has changed (in my case two books being out of stock) and they add monies to orders that no longer meet the minimum for the free shipping, something again they do not feel the need to tell the customer about (my case). Labyrinth has become unlike all the used bookstores I dealt with and worked for in the bad old stone age days before the internet and the worldwide web, skanky and slaggy. They have become, in other words, the mirror image of capitalist enterprises like those of Tanholio Trump. Welcome to the brave new world. Welcome to the best of all possible used bookstore worlds.

The Books of My Life: Wisdom’s Workshop

I have long had an interest in higher education. I am interested in academia as a bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that has changed just as broader society has changed over the years. I am interested in the economic aspects of institutions of higher education and the role economic interests have played and continue to play in colleges and universities in the core nation world and particularly in the British settler society world. I am interested in the politics of universities both internally and externally and the impact political bureaucracies have on academic bureaucracies and vice versa. I am interested in the demographics of universities and how these have changed over the years. I am interested in the historical and cultural geography of universities and the ideologies associated with notions of how colleges and universities should look. I am interested in the culture and subcultures and countercultures of universities, a culture and cultures that mirror while the broader world while, at the same time, wanting to change the world for the better (there is a lot of utopianism among university faculty, some of them old bohemians gone bourgeois, though only those in the applied sciences generally manage to change the world if not for the better).

James Axtell’s Wisdom’s Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016) explores the economic, political, demographic, geographic, and cultural history of the university from the Mediaeval era to the modern American research university or multiversity. and megaversity era. Along the way Axtell briefly, for example, explores the the Mediaeval, Tudor and Stuart (Oxbridge) and 19th century German precedents for the American research university, the historical genealogies of academic bureaucracies, the role faculties play in universities and the cultures associated with university faculties, tensions between the administrative bureaucracy and faculty guilds in universities, the built environment of universities, student life at universities, tensions between universities and the broader society including powerful economic interests particularly over the curriculum, the increasing use of part-time or contingent faculty in American universities (something paralleled in Canadian research universities as well), and the increasing ties between the university, government, and private corporations in his synthetic history of the modern university. Axtell ends his book by noting that American research university are overrepresented among the top universities globally in all the guides which rate universities around the worlds.

As a comparative history Axtell’s book is far too selective. Axtell largely ignores higher education developments Germany and Great Britain in the 20th and 21st century, somewhat surprisingly since the new post-World War II in Britain generally mimicked the post-war American research universities. He ignores Canadian universities like the University of Toronto, which, like the universities he does focus on, is a member of the elite Association of American Universities, the pan-bureaucratic arm of the elite American research university. And while these points may or may not be relevant—Axtell’s focus was on the rise of the American elite research university after all—something else he ignores, namely the fact that the size and wealth of the American economy, itself a product of geography, demography, and culture, is very relevant for why US research universities show up in large numbers in the lists of the top three hundred universities in the world. Sometimes size does matter and the US with its almost 400 million people (2018 estimate) gives it an economic and technological edge over smaller Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and Germany. He also fails to explore the fact that there is great regional variation in the “quality” of US research universities with most of them being found in the US Northeast, Midwest, and Far West and far fewer in the South, the Northern Plains, and the Intermountain West where, again, size matters as does cultural history, particularly the culture of evangelical and secular anti-intellectualism.

 

Life as Crisis Management: The Community Care Physicians Kiada

 

I should have known that it would not get better. Sisyphus, thou aren’t omnipotent and apparently omniscient too. In fact, I should have know it would have gotten worse. Murphy’s Law, thou too are all powerful and all present in modern America. So what is it (with all apologies to Faith No More). It is bureaucracy. It is human incompetence. It is corporate skankiness.

Let me explain. I got up late this morning around 9:00 am. It was later than I wanted to get up because I had an appointment for an OTM, an Osteopathic adjustment, at Community Care Physicians (CCP) at 391 Myrtle Avenue in Albany, in the heart of the busy Albany Medical Centre complex and it was busy to say the least, and I had thought about going to the Co-op before my doctor’s appointment. I had also wanted to take a shower before I went because taking a shower at my four flat complex is akin to trying to figure out a Rubik’s Cube when you have no idea how it works. If I don’t get in the shower between 8:30 and 8:30 am my shower is interrupted by someone else engaged in water use leading to my shower going cold. It is only then safe to get in the shower sometime between 6 pm and 8 pm. So off I rushed to get ready after turning on my phone and my computer to see if I had any messages from CCP. I did not. So off I drove at 9:15 am for my appointment at 9:40 am.

When I got there I was met not only by the check in artist but by her supervisor The supervisor informed me that they, perhaps even she, had tried to call me to tell me the appointment had been cancelled because—and here I am not clear—the doctor was not in or they had double booked once again. This double booking had happened the second time I went to get an adjustment, this one from a doctor I had not seen before because mine is on pregnancy leave as I type. I had to wait an hour to get the adjustment. Apparently I was lucky in this because one was available. By the way, the second adjustment I went for was a half hour late. Today no other appointment was possible so I was told I was shite out of luck. 

The supervisor did tell me they tried to call and they did at 9:34 am, so my phone tells me, six minutes before my appointment. Since I was in the car and I don’t carry my phone around with me as if it were a shot of heroin to which I am thoroughly addicted (apologies to Layne Staley and a host of others), I was already in the car driving the few miles to CCP Myrtle Avenue.

Let me end this immoral tale by stating the obvious again. Bureaucracies are not fully efficient though the mythology about them claims otherwise even in a world where that myth is clearly and indisputably false. Human incompetence is omnipresent and has simply been made more tangible and visible by digital toys. And Sisyphus and Murphy’s Law are omnipresent and all powerful and have been made worse thanks to the toys of the brave new digital age. Bah humbug.

And oh, by the way, my shower, which I took when I got home from my no longer existent appointment with a CCP doctor, was indeed disrupted by someone else using the water. Thank you CCP for not calling me forty minutes before my appointment to tell me it was kaput, no more, gone with the wind.

Life as Crisis Management: The Grocery Store Again

 

It never ceases to amaze me how life is just one Sisypehan crisis after another. Take today...

Today I got up early to go to the grocery store, the Hannaford grocery store to be more precise. I did this because Hannaford had Impossible ground on sale beginning today and while I prefer Beyond ground sale prices matter particularly since Beyond costs over $5 dollars at Walmart now, when they have it which is not very often these days, up almost $2 dollars from before the New Year, and costs over $11 dollars at the Honest Weight Food Coop. I wanted it because I cook Beyond or Impossible burgers with chips for Danish hygge on Friday night for me and my friend.

I should have known, and I actually thought about this, before I went to the grocery at 7:30, that they would not have the item I sought, an item that was, to add insult to injury, to be the foundation of a coupon I had for $10 dollars off of $60 dollars. Nor did they have the Noosa Strawberry and Rhubarb yoghurt I sought or the Brown Cow large Maple Yoghurt I sought. And this was Sunday, the day items went on sale and one of the busiest days for grocery shopping during the week.

I asked the meat stock person if they had the Impossible ground. She said no and that the item had been out of stock for a couple of weeks at, one assumes, the distributors. I then asked why have a sale on the item in the first place if it is unavailable. She rightly said to contact Hannaford headquarters.

Annoyed, not angry as the cash person assumed but then most humans can’t work outside of binary modes of coded thought and realise that annoyed it not anger and vice versa, I complained again about the lack of the item and the fact that I could not use my coupon which expires on Tuesday. He contacted the manager and arranged for me to get a rain cheque for the Impossible and for me to use the coupon whenever I can get the Impossible. Quite nice.

Of course, whether I will be able to get the Impossible ground or use the coupon in the future is another matter. Time will, as it always does, tell.

Life as Crisis Management: The Pharmacy Kiada, Again

I hate the US health insurance system. It is easily the worst in the core nation world. I have used the health insurance systems of Canada, England, France, Australia, and even Russia and all of them, including the Russian one, were easier to use than that of the US in my experience.

More than any part of the US health insurance system the prescription part of the health care system is by far the worst. Since the 2000s I have had problems with Walgreens, with CVS, and with CVS Silver Script, the corporation the New York State and Local Retirement System now farms their retiree prescription medication plan out to, and now Lincoln Pharmacy.

I used Lincoln Pharmacy for my prescription needs because it was close and because it is independent. The fact that it is independent, however, is also why it is a problem for me to use Lincoln Pharmacy. First, I had a problem with Wixela, something I was forced to take for my asthma because my prescription plan no longer covered the similar costing Advair. They did not carry it so I had to get it from the mail order service of CVS Caremark (CVS, of course, is trying to run independents out of business). Then it was Cyclobenzaprine, which I take for muscle pain. As I had turned seventy I was cut off by the prescription drug coverage company not because my doctor said I should be but because the prescription company said I should be. Lincoln only told me this fact after I walked through snow and thirty mile per hour wind to go there to pick it up. Today it was Linzess, which I take for bowel issues, that I learned I could not get. When I went up to get it today Lincoln told me they no longer had a contract with MVP, yet another health insurance company who unbeknownst to me covered this for me through my state insurance, until today, because it was not cost effective for them to do so any longer.

So where does all this bureaucratic bullshite leave old, infirm, and always weary me? Well, it leaves me to clean up yet another US health insurance mess and yet another corporate bureaucratic mess. It left me to change all my prescription information in the online account pages for all four medical groups I go to (Community Care Physicians, Albany Med, Trinity for St. Peter’s, and Albany ENT). It left me to ask Lincoln to switch all my prescriptions to yes hated CVS, the CVS in Delmar. It left me to try to get my Linzess before it runs out, a medicine which causes diarrhoea when you start it again. It left me to whinge once again, just like many other Americans with health insurance, about the royal slaginess that is the US health care system. 

Up yours US health care system. You, to put it nicely, suck.

Life as Crisis Management: Hello Sisyphus, Remember Me?

It never stops, it being fuckups in the digital age. Today I was gifted a lingload of them.

Fuckup number one: I put in an order early this morning for two prescription renewals by phone. I was told they would be ready by 10:30 this morning. They weren’t. So I had to wait five or so minutes for them when I arrived at around 11:25 am.

Fuckup number two: When I went to pay for my prescriptions my credit card was declined. This was news to me since I just paid off my credit card bill on 30 December. Thankfully I had emergency cash, something I have learned is essential in the digital fuckup age.

Fuckup number three: I chatted with my credit card company. They said my card was fine and should not have been declined. They said the problem was probably on the merchant’s end of the equation.

Fuckup number four: When I contacted my credit card company I not only went into my account and hit chat I also called them. When I got a call back they wanted my unique password which I have stashed in my computer somewhere because I can’t remember them all (there are a lot of them to remember, too many, in fact). I declined saying that chat had answered my question, that I did not want to spend minutes opening my file, and that I wanted to take a shower after walking to the pharmacy through 30 mile per hour winds and blowing snow only to find that my credit card was declined.

Fuckup number five: I ordered some books from Labyrinth Books. I had enough to get free shipping which was critical in my ordering the books. When I got the books two were missing. When I contacted Labyrinth and asked them for a revised bill which they never sent before I asked for it (bad form) I discovered I was charged for shipping because they did not have the two books I ordered and which, with the other books, gave me free shipping. CatchLabyrinth22. 

I contacted Labyrinth about this, about not informing me that they did not have two books I ordered and that this meant I had to pay almost $9 dollars in shipping now. They wrote back telling me sorry, boy, you are shite out of luck and that if I wanted to send the books back I had to pay shipping. Apparently, Labyrinth’s policy is screw the customer...twice if you can. My response was what it should be: cancel my account, delete my account, I will never order from you again, and I will be filing a complaint about you with the attorney general of the state of New York. Have a good day.

The Books of My Life: The Dawn of Everything

 

Social scientists over the years have conceptualised societal evolution in a number of ways. In the late 19th and into the 20th century many social scientists argued (and many ethnocentrically inclined amateurs still do) that all human societies evolved from hunter-gatherer societies to horticultural societies to agricultural societies and finally to modern industrial technological societies in succession. For polemicists wedded to this approach it was the last societal form, the industrial, that was the zenith and pinnacle of human and human societal evolution, a conclusion not surprising given that those who made such claims lived in “modern” societies and saw their own modern industrial societies, modern technological societies, and modern political societies as the best of all possible societal worlds (without any of the irony associated with such a statement). Those still engaged in hunting and gathering, horticulture, and agriculture were seen, in this linear conception of societal evolution, as remnants of societal worlds gone by and as possible guides as to what humans and human societies were like the the past before writing evolved (the ethnographic analogy, a metaphor or allegorical that still underlies a lot of bioanthropological studies of prehistoric humans past). 

Given the criticism that the linear model of societal evolution was too ethnocentric, too imperial, and too unilinear many later social scientists ditched the unilinear model of societal evolution for others that were regarded as less unilinear and more, at least theoretically anyway, multilinear. One model of societal evolution that has become popular in historical sociological and historical circles is one that hypothesises that human societies have evolved from the hunter-gatherer society form to the agricultural society form (small scale and large scale), to the modern society form, and to the postmodern society form. In this model, it is argued, all of these societal forms and subforms within societal forms, which can still be found across the globe, were, in Darwinian fashion, adaptations to specific environments. So, it was maintained, no one societal form was or is any better or superior to any other. With this assumption the proponents of this view believed they had conquered human ethnocentrism (Icarian hubris).

Both the unilinear model of societal evolution and the multilinear model of societal evolution held that  societal evolution was driven primarily by economic change. In both models the change from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to industry, and finally to a service and retail economy is conceptualised not only as driving societal change but also, as a consequence, the driving force behind demographic change (though it is often admitted that demographic change can and often does simultaneously drive economic change), political change, cultural change, and geographic or environmental change. 

Though it still dominated societal evolution discourse the hunter-gatherer/agriculture/modernity/postmodernity model is not the only model of societal evolution, change, or development out there in social science land. There is another model of societal change that is less tied to changes in economic modes of production than the hunter-gatherer, agriculture/modernity/postmodernity paradigm. This alternative model of societal evolution, one that is particularly prevalent in anthropological circles, focuses on kinship structures and political forms and sees the latter, in particular, as the driving force of societal evolution or development. In this approach to societal development it is held that there have been four forms of human societies: band societies, tribal societies, and chieftain societies. Sociologists and political scientists might add monarchical societies, authoritarian societies, autocratic and totalitarian societies, and democratic societies into the mix since they, historically speaking, have been more interested in “modern" and "postmodern” “complex” societies than have anthropologists traditionally.

In this politics oriented model band societies are those societies which engage in hunting and gathering, which are demographically small consisting of 20 to 40 members, and which are largely egalitarian. Tribal societies, in this model, are seen as those societies which engage in horticulture, which farm often with ploughs but which do not engage in irrigation projects. Tribal societies in this model are seen as largely egalitarian but only for the in-group, the in-kin group which is defined on the basis of lineage or totemic identity, save when it comes to age and gender. Tribal societies, so the story goes, generally live in more permanent settlements and are characterised by Big Men who sponsor and create the conditions for those in the in-group to engage in rituals and feasts. Ritual specialist roles and craft specialist roles in tribal societies are generally part-time “positions”. Demographically, tribal societies are larger than band societies. Chieftain societies, in this theoretical model, are grounded in conceptions of kin identity as well but chieftain societies are characterised by hierarchical ranks and greater inequality compared to band or tribal societies. This is because, so the argument goes, they live in permanent communities and engage in agriculture which produces a surplus that can be expropriated from the peasants by the few elites who  dominate ranked or hierarchical chieftain societies. Many chieftain societies, polemicists for this model claim, are also often characterised by slavery. 

In their comparative anthropological history The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Picador, 2021) cultural anthropologist David Graeber and comparative archaeologist David Wengrow, argue that all of these models of societal evolution are problematic for a variety of reasons. They are all, Graeber and Wengrow argue, too ethnocentric, too teleological, too technologically reductive, and too lacking in empirical support. Though the proponents of the multilinear and anthropological models, argue Graeber and Wengrow, claim that they are not teleological and are multilinear rather than unilinear, they still, if more subtly perhaps than the proponents of the unilinear societal and human evolution, continue to assume that their society is the culmination of societal evolution, something that makes these models the kissing cousins kin of the unilinear models of economic (e.g., Rostow) and political (e.g., Fukuyama with his shades of Hegel) evolution that were prominent in Western intellectual culture in the 1950s and 1960s and in the immediate aftermath of the-Cold War in the “modern” West.

The problems with this approach should be obvious anyone with a college education but far too often is not. Empirically speaking, not every society is part of the core, the rich industrial and postindustrial “democratic" nations of the West, which are implicitly and sometimes explicitly regarded, by Western promoters of the models of societal evolution we have been discussing, the best of all possible economic, political, and technological worlds, a notion that is, of course, inherently ethnocentric and inherently teleological (“natural" landmarks on the road to the radiant future). Additionally, the models of societal evolution we have been discussing tend to either elide or forget the fact that Western imperialism, Western geographic imperialism, Western political imperialism, Western economic imperialism, and Western cultural imperialism, and the power and authority associated with all of those forms of imperialism and the globalisation of that power, have played in remaking large parts of the globe in the Western image via coercion or force and convincement, something that can take many forms including the use of loans and aid to promote Western political, Western economic, and Western cultural forms. Finally, these models of societal evolution forget or elide the fact that the archaeological record does not, as Graeber and Wengrow point out, show a straight line from foraging to agriculture to an increase in inequality to the rise of the city to the advent of the state and later nation-state, to the rise of private property and to the advent of writing. In fact, as Graeber and Wengrow point out, there is ample archaeological evidence for the intentional abandonment of states and the inequalities and abuses of power that have often characterised them.

While Graeber and Wengrow give readers an excellent summary of the current state of the art of the archaeological record, a summary that undermines all linear and teleological models of societal evolution, from the stone age to the bronze age, it is their conception of freedom and power and the relations between the two that is perhaps the most interesting, innovative, and enlightening aspects of their book. Graeber and Wengrow argue that there are and have been, historically speaking, three elementary or primal forms of freedom which have existed in human communities since the beginning, the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey. and the freedom to create new social realises, all of which humans have engaged in for millennia via migration and through schismogenesis, a concept they borrow from anthropologist Gregory Bateson. As Graeber and Wengrow note, early humans could and did create societies that were intentionally different from those of their neighbours. If, for example the neighbours of one cultural group were hierarchical and rent through by power imbalances and hierarchical authority structures, the other culture could and did, as they did in the culture regions of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, for instance, create societies that promoted greater equality and greater freedom of choice. 

Over time, Graeber and Wengrow argue, these three elementary forms of freedoms could be and sometimes were curtailed by the three elementary forms of power they delineate: sovereignty, bureaucratic power, and charismatic power, all different forms of power that have different historical roots, a fact that problematises the social evolutionist claim that with large scale agriculture came larger numbers of people and, as a consequence big men who were often considered to have some relationship to the divine, who thus were able to dominate, control, and expropriate surpluses from those they ruled along with bureaucracies that helped big men dominate, control and expropriate the surpluses of their populations.

Needless to say, those of us who live in the core nations today with their vast inequalities, their vast expropriations, their vast and supposedly impersonal bureaucracies, their vast surveillance apparatuses, their vast militaries, their vast border patrol militaries, and their passports have lost the freedom to move with ease (something corporate driven globalisation policies do as well), much of our freedom to disagree, given the prominence and success of their socialisation for conformity, a socialisation for conformity aided and abetted by media bureaucracies and educational bureaucracies, and the police-surveillance apparatuses that almost all core nations now have in order to, at least in part, control their populations. In a message of hope Graeber and Wengrow argue that despite these powerful forms of social control we humans still have the freedom, the potential freedom, to be creative and to escape from the golden and gilded cages that trap us. But can we? Will we? I am not so sure. Stay tuned.

The Dawn of Everything is an important and impressive synthesis of anthropological, sociological, and archaeological evidence melded to social theory. It is, a book that is sure to be one of the classics of comparative history and wholistic anthropology. I can’t recommend this sure to be seminal book enough. It is a must read for anyone interested in history, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, human evolution, political science, and social change, and represents, along with the works of Noah Yuval Harari, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker—all of whom Graeber and Wengrow critique for their teleologism—and others a much needed return to the grand historical and theoretical sociology, anthropology, and history of Karl Mark, Max Weber, and Emile Durkheim. Essential.