Paparazzi Ethnography

Dancing.

Biliana Stremska — Berkeley artist, painter, architect, folk-dancer. We attended the opening of the Mythos Gallery‘s showing of her work along with other artists of the west coast. In addition to Biliana’s watercolors, which include energy themes, such as solar panels on homes in Sofia, Bulgaria — Portland’s Dane Wilson had several pieces concerning the light emitted from street lamps.

Capturing my attention was the inclusion of public lighting and renewables as suitable subjects, not only in the paintings, but also in the titles of the works themselves. One piece of Biliana is titled House with Solar Panels, while Dane had a few paintings with lamps, one titled Night Light.

Berkeley local Horst Bansner and Dane, darn near unnerved me with their chatter. Crammed into that little gallery, they badgered me on what I do (pipes, energy, paparazzi) and how could it possibly be anthropology, given that anthropologists focus on non-literate cultures, thought to be pre-modern.

It is a good question that soon had me admitting that I am a fall-guy for spaces of non-literacy. The fleeting phenomena rarely speaks with text.


In social spaces of interaction — in a language captured through face-to-face encounters — are where I find the verbatims and accents of emotional attachment.

I arrived ill-equipped. All I had was an I-Phone camera with a dying battery.

But I squeezed in a photo of what food the gallery curator put on display, what kinds of utensils, napkins, glasses, beverages, and whatnots.

A reading of Norbert Elias‘ History of Manners, suggests our relationship to the display of food is a dominant in how we define our sense of delicacy. Elias points out that table utensils, beginning in court society of 16th century, begin to shrink, actually get smaller, especially with the introduction of the fork. Beasts, once displayed on tables, disappear — even the carving of meat vanishes.

No Fork! and Eating with a Knife!

Unprepared Meat brought to the Table

Good visual examples of Elias’ narrative may be seen in the swashbuckling movies of Errol Flynn, especially The Adventures of Robin Hood, which I found on the web and cut and pasted here.

Elias points to a change over the past several hundred years from an instinct for interpersonal violence to an instinct for self-restraint. Interpersonal violence was part of a world in which there was interpersonal everything. In medieval times, body movements were unnoticeably shared. Masters, servants, children, all slept in one room. People ate with their hands out of the one-shared bowl, drank out of one shared glass, defecated in their commons.

“Back Then” — Interpersonal Violence was entirely Pleasurable

Bringing swords to dinner and fighting at the table is no longer acceptable

Thus, a shift from medieval society, where interpersonal violence is pleasurable—vendettas, feuds, revenge, duels — to modern society where violence is pathological — enables populations to sleep soundly as government drops bombs on civilian populations elsewhere.

In medieval court society, there arose an idea about court and specifically, courtesy, which drew attention to the idea of bodily shame and delicacy.

The very idea of Courtesy arrives at Court Society

The very Idea of courtly shame led to material practices that today we call manners. Over the centuries, increasing forms of self-control and restraint — of compulsions arising directly from threat of weapons and physical force gradually diminish while at the same time, giving rise to other forms of dependency — a police force—leading to affects in the form of self control.

Modern Courtesy requires Interpersonal Delicacy and Manners.

Politeness requires the Bomb