The Banana Peel Project

In the flow and flux of finding a new place, it seems that I lost track of something for a moment: I forgot that my ways of thinking and doing and knowing are my ways of thinking and doing and knowing. To be receptive of new ways of living, loving, and doing is to allow your self to be transformed by the fields of ideas around you. It is to stop being selfish and self-centered, to recognize that you do not exist apart from the world that is around you and inside you.

But in all this permeating change, I forgot to remember myself. I forgot to keep my feet on the ground while the winds circled around me. I forgot about narcissism.

I came into this space to play with culture, history, and technologies of consciousness. Here, I found agency, action, materiality, the deterritorializing tip of the rhizome. I got lost in here, now, presence: I was consumed by ethnography as the only way of doing anything.

I forgot that I came here looking for movement and flux and construction. I forgot that I came here looking for a way to trace, to reverse engineer, to discover how we got to this point. By forgetting history, I was forgetting myself.

And it seems I’m not the only one. Chandra Mukerji has written:

The comparative methods from historical sociology were never designed to answer questions of culture. This has left practitioners in this subfield (including me) mucking around with historical, art historical, feminist and literary methods to try to write something empirically grounded with a theoretical focus appropriate for a historical sociology of culture (50).

Something of the history of culture can certainly be found in micromovements and ethnomethodology and timestamped field notes. But if we’re going to look at the processes of creation, we have to look at where they’ve been and where they are now.

Cultural habits that have histories that can be traced, and the erasures that have obscured them in the present can be found in earlier acts of suppression or social isolation. And cultural sociology can be the richer for seeing those habits as connected to “forgetfulness and error.” While ethnographers look at the social life of un(der)articulated cultural forms, cultural sociologists can trace their genealogies (67).

To close doors is intellectual suicide, the deliberate suffocation of the thinking self. If we move beyond dimensional thinking, if we flatten hierarchies of meaning and their historical structures, then we also move away from binaries and exclusive choices. Why does a move towards one space necessarily mean a move away from another?

To move towards a historical sociology of culture is not to move away from empirical ethnography. It’s just a way to recognize that there is more than one way to talk about truth and more than one way to move forward.

So let yourself be permeated, pierced, torn, divided, reconstituted, and reorganized. But don’t ever let yourself be pushed.

Now, my feet are back on the ground, and nothing is as expected.

[see Mukerji, C. (2007). Cultural genealogy: Method for a historical sociology of culture or cultural sociology of history. Cultural Sociology 1; 49-71.]