Ethnologia Europaea

The Cream Effect

From the beginning of the article: Waste is a word with complex connotations. As in T.S.Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land” from a war-torn Europe of 1922, it may include the double meaning that signifies both “deserted” and “rubbish”. Then there is wasting away, as in disappearing or losing strength, wasting as squandering or destroying, wasted as in consumed. We may talk about a wasted life, a waster, a wasteful activity or a waste product. But what happens when you use cultural phenomena like waste disposal and the production of refuse as an entrance into a world of overlooked or underdeveloped types of cultural processes? My starting point is an ongoing project concerning refuse, The Universe of Waste: On Culture and Decomposition.

From the beginning of the article: The concept of “cultural bracketing” can be a tool for describing how diffuse and changeable is the world in which people move – full of possibilities and open to admit new experiences. Words combined with “cultural” otherwise can easily take on a deceptive clarity. But things are often latent, waiting to be put to use; they live an unnoticed life. If things are not clearly arranged in taxonomies and categories, what about people, thoughts, and mental processes?

From the beginning of the article Every summer I visit an old abandoned farm house in a deserted woodland, far away from the bustling holiday life out at the coast. For 30 years I have returned to a landscape of gradual decay and ageing. Each time I track the effects of a past winter season. The planks are rotting, the roof is caving in, nails work themselves out of the grip of wood and stand exposed until they rust and disappear. Plants and sprouts sneak into widening gaps and cracks. Moss and lichen create new color combinations and surface structures. The roof tiles become brittle and fall apart. Changes between warm and cold, wet and dry, speed up the decay process.

From the beginning of the article: In natural history, fossils provide important evidence of past life forms and their activity (Pellant 1990). Things like ammonites, trilobites and graptolites are the tangible remains of what were once living beings. Although their original chemical composition has changed, the physical structure is often perfectly preserved through a process of petrification. Accordingly, there is a sense in which these creatures have a continuing material existence despite being well and truly dead.

From the beginning of the article: In a small bucket underneath the sink in my kitchen I collect valuable stuff. In there goes banana skins, potato peel, soaked tea leaves, the remains of squeezed lemons and faded flowers, overripe tomatoes, wrinkled paprika, slouching lettuce leaves, along with other leftovers and remainders, more or less decayed, moldy and putrid. Every now and then I empty the bucket on my compost heap, and mix my kitchen collection with garden wastes such as dry leaves, weeds, grass cuttings and dead plants. I should probably turn and water my compost pile more regularly in order to achieve an efficient composting process, but I usually have neither the time nor the energy to fulfill these tasks. Nevertheless, after a year or two, when I dig into the pile I might get the spade full of dark brown compost, ready to be used as a first-rate soil amendment in my garden. Quite often each spadeful also contains a number of identifiable remnants of what was once put into the pile, such as peach kernels, corncobs, eggshells and pieces of wood. In addition I might find various worms, millipedes and wood-lice, which show that the process of decomposition is not yet completed.

At the last page of the first book Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote on her childhood Little house in the big woods she is lying in bed, while her father plays “Shall Auld Acquaintance be Forgot” on his violin. When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, ‘What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?’‘They are the days of a long time ago, Laura’ Pa said ‘Go to sleep, now’.The other books on and by Ingalls Wilder depict a journey into modernity. The prairie, onto which they will set off in the next book, will be the stage for a drama about this isolated but loving and hard-working nuclear family. As we read on, this prairie landscape is filled up by railways, general stores, iron stoves, schoolhouses and printed calico. Little house in the big woods deals with another, less transparent landscape, representing Laura’s early childhood, as well as the childhood memories of her parents and grandparents. The book is a retrospection into a timeless, innocent place before Fall, departure, movement and history.

Talk of speed is the companion to the modern project. Ever growing speed seems to be characteristic of the modern life, at least our perspective on this life. There are many examples of the relation between the modern project and high speed. A perhaps limited but obvious example is to be found in the history of architecture and urbanism and the Italian futurists’ affection for the high speed and the low viscosity of the city (Banham 1980). Another example from the history of architecture is the modernist architect’s habit to put a fast car in front of their new buildings photographed to overcome the immobility of the house and its attachment to the place and ground. A superficial glance sees this striving for urban speed as an attitude of limited significance. But understood in relation to the development of the history of city planning, these attitudes and ideas are of great concrete importance and consequence.

In the thriller Collateral (2004), Tom Cruise is a contract killer called Vincent. There is a scene depicting a shoot-out in a Korean night club in East Los Angeles. Filmed with hand-held cameras and accompanied by the noise of shooting and relentless disco music, the space of the night club shoot-out collapses as in a major catastrophe (or catastrophe movie) as we watch the scene. Bodies are thrown towards each other and onto the floor. But as much as the scene depicts a powerful eruption of entropy, chaos, and cultural kinesthesis (see O’Dell 2004), the scene can also be understood as an example of cultural synchronization. At the same time as everything crumbles, the relentless and intoxicating rhythms of the dance music played in the night club actually seem to gather kinesthetic energy from the shoot-out (Klinkmann 2005). This kind of cultural synchronization, here seen on a relatively small scale, is the theme of this chapter. More specifically I want to examine the concept of cultural synchronization (“synch”) by way of its negation, cultural desynchronization (“unsynch”), with examples taken from a broad field of practices, mainly through popular music.

We have a situation where cities and large companies are competing for investments on a global market. Prestige projects are built in order to draw attention to locality. Every city wants its own Gehry-Guggenheim museum in what could be called “The Bilbao-effect” (Foster 2002). In this case architecture can be seen as sites of spectacular spectatorship. One example of this would be the award-winning Turning Torso apartment tower project in Malmö.

A still is a state of calm, a lull in the action. But it is also the machine hidden in the woods that distills spirits into potency through heat, vapor and condensation. In painting, a still life is a genre that captures the liveliness of inanimate objects (fruit, flowers, bowls) by suspending their sensory beauty in an intimate scene charged with the textures of paint, experience, and desire. Hitchcock was a master of the still in film production. A simple pause of the moving camera to focus on a door or a telephone could produce powerful suspense.

Zero is generally understood as indicating equilibrium, an initial point or origin. Zero-making is the action directed towards elements of cultures where the meaning of an object is set to zero. A. [Industrial] Zero-making was introduced in the 1990s in terms of new production concepts, human resource management, flat organizing, zero defects in production, multi-skilling and new management techniques emphasizing total employer loyalty.Zero-making is defined as a revolutionary theme. It is the setting of time to zero in order to organize a fresh start, erasing history, wiping the slate clean and promoting the idea of late modern corporate revolutions with labels like: Japanization, The New Economy, ICT Society, The Third Industrial Revolution and The Velvet Revolution. B. [Sports] [Synonymously] Sudden death: Extra play in a situation of equal score after a game to determine the winner.

Apart from a small wealthy elite segment of the world that craves natural foods, natural fibers, natural childbirth, organic gardening, feng shui, human powered sports, environmentalism, deep ecology, natural death, and preserves for nature, wildlife, nudity, and aboriginal peoples, what the mass of humanity clearly prefers is an artificial, sanitized, synthetic environment. Through our consumption choices we clearly signal a preference for synthetic foods, artificial additives, genetic modification, pesticides, herbicides, atomic energy, surrogate motherhood, artificial intelligence, Disneyfication, and McDonaldization. This is not mere passive acceptance of conditions foisted upon us by conniving marketers or totalitarian governments. Rather it reveals an active desire for the artificial over the natural, the "real."

Once a year the streets of Zagreb are filled with piles of junk, old stuff that the inhabitants of the town centre no longer need or want, cleaned out of attics, cellars, drawers and closets. It is carried out of front doors or thrown out of windows. And as the days proceed, the pavements and doorsteps become more and more difficult to pass through. Sometimes one gets a glimpse of previously well-known, but now long and often deliberately forgotten images. May 2004, an email dumped into the inbox, with three photos attached. It is a rather short, but precise, message: “Here you can find some pictures related to the huge junk on the Zagreb’s streets these days. Enjoy. P.S. some of those images are really HUGE junk :-)."

In November of 1989 I received a letter from Prague that was sent to me by a friend, Renata. As I opened the envelope I was surprised to find that in addition to a letter, Renata had included a bell, about the size of a thimble, hung from a thin red ribbon. It was made out of a simple ceramic material and lacked any sort of ornamentation. As bells go, this was a modest object. However, what I held in my hands was more than a cheap bell, it was the materialization of a cultural backdraft that had swept through Prague, Czechoslovakia, and much of Eastern Europe over the course of that fall. Amongst firefighters, backdraft is known as an explosive phenomenon that derives its energy from a longer process of accumulation in which the power of partially un-burnt gases and other combustibles are suddenly released when presented with a new source of fuel. The fuel that ignites backdrafts and causes the pursuant deflagration is oxygen – something that might otherwise seem benign.

Ebba is a “customer experience designer” though she sometimes calls herself a “strategy consultant”. She works with social innovation, hybrid creation and social software. “The meaning of my job is to explain how we can build our identity together,” she says. Her company designs services, environments and interactions. She is a young Swedish woman who started her career in San Francisco and London. Now she is working in Stockholm in her own company. Talking to her is like talking to one of my ethnography colleagues; her vocabulary is filled with culture analysis buzz words. We seem to use the same concepts, but to very different ends. Here we may follow how concepts from academia are translated into market practices.

On a daily basis people make many choices from different assortments, menus and databases. These choices are made among the garments in their favourite stores, just as in the cutting and pasting functions of the software they use to work and create. Are there any common denominator for these situations and activities? They may all be examples of the cultural process of menuing. There are two sides of menuing. First is choosing and making decisions with the help of menus and preconfigured assortments or databases. Second, menuing is also the activity of designing menus; sorting out, categorizing and arranging. These two sides of menuing are fundamental in any industrialized consumption society, rooted in systems of standardization and the systematics of handling assorted materials that emerged with industrialism.

It has been said that when strangers begin to accept each other because they experience themselves as strange, they start a promising development. This is a rather surprising thought. If I do not understand myself, how should I be able to understand other people? But since understanding and acceptance are not necessarily intertwined, social life may work anyway, in spite of the value and function that “understanding” has for the definition of cultures. Non-understanding is often perceived as one of the ways to demarcate the boundaries between different cultures. The Other is not regarded as of the same kind as you, since his or her behaviour is unintelligible. But this is too simple. Maybe it is also possible to see non-understanding as an essential part of every society, even among friends and relatives, and in that case what we call “culture” could be analysed as a universal way of disguising strangeness and make it endurable.

To camouflage is to adapt in a situation. The word is used in different ways with many connotations and synonyms, as in disguise, mask, hide, conceal, obscure, cover-up and create a façade or smoke-screen. What the words have in common is that they point out how something can give protection from recognition. Camouflage is therefore a good word to use in studying how the individual being can mask and hide differences, stigmas, or abnormalities. Before translating the concept into specific cultural practices, it may be worth noting that it has been developed in two very separate fields: biology and war.

In the midst of a busy Copenhagen neighbourhood the exclamation ‘SILENCIO’ is written on a wall. Taking up much space, the writing can be seen from afar. For years the city council’s graffiti squad has for some reason decided to leave this particular piece alone. One can only speculate if the word is meant as an imperative. Passing the wall every day, it makes me smile. The silencing effect of the exclamation is at best a reminder that things can be different. In the street, cars, people, trucks and shopkeepers go about their business. Every hour the bell from a nearby school rings through the hustle and bustle. Children are playing in the schoolyard. Whenever they get the chance, they cross the street in large and noisy groups to buy candy bars for lunch. A competing bell from the church on the other corner makes people hurry in the morning and again in the evening. An extended melody from the church tower is underlining the eight o’clock hour in the morning as particularly important – it’s time to go to work!

Substantivism and formalism have been tossed around by anthropologists for many decades. Are people basically rational and guided by the logic of their cultural context, or irrational and guided by belief at the expense of observation? So far the answer appears to be “yes.” These two perspectives have never died out of anthropology, and one of these two beliefs about human nature can be teased out of most treatises (Wilk 1996). Hobbes vs. Locke, Weber vs. Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss vs. Evans-Pritchard; for Bruno Latour (1993), we have never been rational; for Marshall Sahlins natives think differently (1995); for Eric Wolf it is the anthropologists who are irrational (1982).

Did our forefathers ever sleep? They must have done, sleep being an elementary body function. But sleep displays cultural variations and has cultural meaning as well. Sleep is staged with different artifacts, rooms and by different performances, culturally informed and individually decided. Like eating, dressing and housing, sleeping is a common human feature. Modern science tells us that we sleep at least 1/3 of our lives. A life of 70 years includes about 23 years sleeping and dreaming. Modern science also informs us that there are four periods of sleep interrupted by REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, when we dream. Of the 23 years of sleep we might dream during as many as five or six of them. We remember very little of this (Alvarez 1995: 84).