Wednesday 18 February 2009 The Tactics of Imagination de Certeau & Appadurai at Everyday Practice

Tales & Legends “…are deployed, like games, outside of and isolated from daily competition, that of the past, the marvelous, the original… Moves, not truths, are recounted…” (23)

Anonymity & The Past Page 2: The ordinary person, at the dawn of the 16th Century, becomes “everyman” and “nobody” (NEMO) NOBODY (oistin) was the name Odysseus gave the Cyclops

The Formality of Everyday Practices “…is indicated in these tales [collected by Propp], which frequently reverse the relationship of power and, like the stories of miracles, ensure the victory of the unfortunate in fabulous, utopian space. This space protects the weapons of the weak against the reality of the established order…” (23)

Imagination as Experience

Imagination “…has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, & ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of people in many societies. It has entered the logic of ordinary life…” (5)

Not Fantasy or Idle Fancy While Fantasy carries with it a kind of escapism, imagination “…has a projective sense about it, the sense of being a prelude to some sort of expression, whether aesthetic or otherwise. Fantasy can dissipate…” (7)

Community of Sentiment “…Part of what the Mass media make possible, because of the conditions of collective reading, criticism, and pleasure, is… a ‘community of sentiment’… a group that begins to imagine and feel things together…” (8)

Invisible Colleges Sodalities that “…are more volativle, less professionalized, less subject to collectively shared criteria of pleasure, taste, or mutual relevance [than scientific/specialized groupings]. They are communities in themselves but always potentially communities for themselves capable of moving from shared imagination to collective action” (8)

The first biracial kiss on American Television

Cultivating the Everyday “Anthropology is my archive of lived actualities found in all sorts of ethnographies about peoples who have lived very different sorts of lives from my own, today and in the past... It is the one [archive] I best know how to read… [and] predisposes me strongly toward the idea that globalization is not the story of cultural homogenization. This latter argument is the very least that I would want the reader to take away from this book” (11 emphasis added)

The substantialization of culture “…[as noun] seems to bring culture back into the discursive space of race, the very idea it was originally designed to combat… the noun culture appears to privilege the sort of sharing, agreeing, and bounding that fly in the face of the facts of unequal knowledge and the differential prestige of lifestyles, and to discourage attention to the worldviews and agency of those who are marginalzied or dominated” (12)

The contrastive property of certain things “…[The] main virtue [of difference] is that it is a useful heuristic that can highlight points of similarity and contrast between all sorts of categories, classes, genders, roles, groups, and nations… when we therefore point to a practice, a distinction, a conception, an object, or an ideology as having a cultural dimension…we stress the idea of situated difference… in relation to something local, embodied, and significant…” (12)

Collectives on the Move “I suggest that we regard as cultural only those differences that either express, or set the groundwork for, the mobilization of group identities… culture is a pervasive dimension of human discourse that exploits difference to generate diverse conceptions of group identity… as a boundary-maintenance question, culture then becomes a matter of group identity as constituted by some differences among others” (13)

From Mass to Masses “Culturalist movements (for they are almost always efforts to mobilize) are the most general form of the work of the imagination and draw frequently on the fact or possibility of migration or secession. Most important, they are self-conscious about identity, culture, and heritage, all of which tend to be part of the deliberate vocabulary of culturalist movements as they struggle with states and other culturalist focuses and groups” (15)

Old Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe

Outside the New Basilica

Inside the New Basilica

Our Lady of Guadalupe