something I very much needed to read today
hello vonnie

titsay

if i look back, i am lost
occasionally subtle
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Kiana Khansmith
DEAR READER

Kaledo Art

shark vs the universe
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Jules of Nature
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

JBB: An Artblog!
One Nice Bug Per Day

tannertan36

⁂
trying on a metaphor
seen from United States
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seen from United States

seen from United States
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seen from Malaysia

seen from Vietnam

seen from Brazil

seen from United States
seen from Australia
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seen from China
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@collecting--thoughts
something I very much needed to read today
Tony Hoagland, from "Don’t Tell Anyone"
perfect song by Heather Christle
The Courier-News, Bridgewater, Pennsylvania, January 19, 1933
Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Louise and Frances Norcross (Letter 225), September 1860
it’s awesome talking to anthropology graduate students because they will so confidentially brag about the ‘decolonial turn’ of their own discipline and then in the next breath describe ‘culture’ as a coherent unit of analysis. I would say that’s nice dear but to be honest it’s not very nice.
whats your criticism of culture as a coherent unit of analysis? i can think of several angles to take here but im curious what yours is.
For me I would say it’s similar to the criticisms you would make of “the individual” as a unit of analysis - there are many methodological problems with how you try to draw a boundary around what constitutes a culture (or an individual). It allows one to formulate phrases like “Canadian culture” or “queer culture” as if such a thing coherently exists. And I use “methodological” here specifically to mean a set of assumptions that allow you to determine what your unit of analysis is, what the “thing” is that you will study. What assumptions underly the conclusion that “culture” (much like the individual) is an object that can be studied?
This comes from an idea of culture-as-object, as something distinct from other object-ified social phenomena and can be bounded by the borders of “culture.” I think it was Aime Cesaire who called ethnography a “white method”, for example - the presumptions underlying ethnography as a method comes from the perspective of a scientist who is external to “the culture” under study, who comes in from outside to document, observe, and even “participate” in a given “culture” before going back to the academy and reporting on “the culture of Papua New Guinea” or etc. The analogy of the individual is similarly fraught when we think about how western psychology often talks about things like addiction, mental illness, the very concept of a “personality disorder” and so on, as these things that affect and originate from “individuals”. The “individual,” like “culture,” is a thing you can map causal claims onto - some individuals are disordered, some cultures are backwards, because they are “objects” with “properties” that can be described, much like you would describe the colour and texture of a basketball.
this is obviously not unique to anthropology - Dorothy Smith, a feminist sociologist, talks about this in The Everyday World As Problematic in the context of women being “an object of study” in sociology, a configuration that presumes an external masculine Sociologist who is inherently ignorant of women. Men are subjects (capable of reason and writing, capable of study), women are objects (inert phenomena to be studied, which is how we get claims like “women are irrational”). Applying this back to a colonial context, anthropology’s origins as a data-gathering tool for colonial powers (Said talks a bit about this in Orientalism iirc) positions “cultures” as objects that exist to be studied by white, Anglo, western subjects. I’m not that familiar with anthropology’s role within shaping colonial policies, so idk much about that side of it, although I do know in Canada that there have been recent pushes for indigenous policies of data sovereignty, where indigenous nations, if engaged as research subjects by universities, are given powers to restrict, control, or withhold data/results/research access from researchers if they don’t like the way the research is being conducted or written about (I think the book Decolonising Methodologies by Linda T Smith discusses this, although it’s been a while since I read anything from it).
this doesn’t mean that “culture” is never a relevant or useful concept (much like “the individual” can be useful/helpful/relevant), but that it’s a concept that emerged for the purposes of articulating a given set of colonial interests and powers (when talking about anthropology’s use of “culture” anyway - idk what other histories the concept has outside of that). And this specific post was spurred by hearing an anthro grad student talk about “the homogeneity of Quebecois culture,” a phrase that may sound innocuous but is one that is currently being deployed for extremely Islamophobic purposes in Quebec (eg their ban on “religious symbols” being worn in certain professions, a ban that primarily target muslims, under the guise of maintaining a ‘secular’, homogenous Francophone “culture”)
The thing about empty, mindless fun - like TikTok, for example - is that, for all the many intelligent people who may enjoy it on occasion and who profess to "shut off their brains" and use it "just to relax", etcetera, there are magnitudes more who enjoy it because it is the pinnacle of what they can comprehend or appreciate.
Designing digital spaces that incentivize long-term, shallow engagement to be enjoyed by users with less intellectually-oriented pursuits is what makes those people vulnerable to radicalization, certainly, but what makes these platforms a haven for right-wing speech in the first place is that they're extremely easy and require very little investment, financial or that of developing skill. Not to say that you don't find conservatives on other websites and apps, but they're less likely to become overtly toxic. YouTube, for example, impresses a need for a camera, a computer, editing software, tripods, etcetera. For TikTok and Twitter, on the other hand, you only really need a cell-phone and a lot of free time to post.
Camille Rankine, from "History", Incorrect Merciful Impulses
poet of an ordinary heartbreak, chris abani
Bianca Stone, “The Future Is Here,” in Someone Else’s Wedding Vows
Mary Oliver, White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems (1994)
— Elisa Gabbert, “I Don’t Want to Hear Any Good News or Bad News”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke’s Book of Hours
May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude
If we do not do this work, if we do not collaboratively call into question a system of knowledge that delights in accumulation by dispossession and profits from ecocidal and genocidal practices, if we do not produce and share stories that honor modes of humanness that cannot and will not replicate this system, we are doomed.
from Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick
someplace like montana by Ada Limón
tuesday by Alex Dimitrov
It's always Alex Dimitrov
march by Mary Oliver