Paparazzi Ethnography

“They don’t know and they don’t care” continued…

In the New York Times movie review of Decasia, Sarah Boxer suggests that popular culture has seen a revival of interest in “the will of things” to become more disorderly, to resist form, to seek entropy, maximum disorder, minimum sense. There is a growing aesthetic fascination with the deterioration of objects into matter, shape into stuff, form into deformity. The subject of decay has acquired new drama and character. It has fans, chroniclers, hangers-on.

Similarly, in Romanticism and the Life of Things, H.T. Mitchell observes that today’s interest in thingness has its roots in Romanticism, though not quite the spiritual kind of yesterday. Today, we are physical with Romanticism. The slogan for our time is nothing falls apart, but things come alive. “The modernist anxiety over the collapse of structure is replaced by the panic over uncontrolled growth of structures—cancers, viruses, and other rapidly evolving entities” (2001:171-2).

In her work on dwelling in West Virginia, anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, examines how progress literally creates the conditions for a kind of forgetting and discarding of things — old trucks, factories abandoned and worn down by rain and rust, cast away littered in out of the way spaces, hollers, streams and gulleys across Appalachia. For dwellers living among these “spaces” neglected on the road to progress — these discarded objects become a time and space experience.

Objects long abandoned become relevant and potent emotional markers of a personal present, past, and future. By binding themselves in folksy (ethical) and practical (mimetic) ways to “useless” objects, Stewart’s informants are members of an ethical-cultural landscape — defined by being “passed over” — an externalized space on the side of the road.











James Faubion has an equally fascinating take on debris, in particular, the remnants of Greek architecture within the city Athens. Here, decayed materials are a mode by which Athenians historically construct their present. Thus, whether finding love among the ruins in Athens, Greece, or in Athens, West Virginia, our daily relationship with the past is analogous to the practice of bricolage. Nothing complicated. Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested all practical living is about privileging “historical facts” selected from an inexhaustible multitude of “psychic movements” (1966) or, in Faubion’s words, different modalities of the modern.

Spaces of Intersection

The three images are spaces of intersection that reside on the threshold of everyday movements. They are spaces of intention left over from my father’s handiwork in a home where years later, today’s residents live among his debris.

No. 1

A square block of wood. Sandwiched between a banister from one side and wooden handrail on the other.