Sapir wrote in 1924 in a splendidly titled article, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious“: The whole terrain through which we are now struggling is a hotbed of subjectivism, a splendid terrain for the airing of national conceits. For all that, there are a large number of international agreements in opinion as to the salient cultural characteristics [...]
I was reading a curious old book called The Rise of the Student Estate in Britain (by Eric Ashby and Mary Anderson, 1970) and I came across a rather shocking passage: This happened in 1860 in Aberdeen. The students wanted Sir Andrew Leith Hay, the ‘local candidate’, and there was in fact a numerical majority [...]
In this winter’s exhibition on the history of Paris-8 at Vincennes (the university’s first site in the 70s), I was particularly interested in a text that discusses the relationship between Paris-8 and U.S. academia. The exhibit was separated into panels each starting with one letter of the alphabet, and this was one of the last [...]
For about two weeks this month, a large space by the entrance to Paris-8 was occupied by students. It had formerly been a coffeeshop operated by a private company, but had been closed months or years ago. To enter after hours when the campus was supposed to be closed, you had to climb up on [...]
A few weeks ago I put together a quick presentation on the U.S. university system for a meeting of European university activists. It’s a strange experience, suddenly being the only American in a room and feeling some sort of obligation to describe a massive institutional system with at least some minimal level of accuracy. I [...]
There are times when I feel like ethnography should be less about seeing the local point of view and more about prying free all those sights, events, phenomena that are locally invisible. For everyday life, in my fieldsite at least, is full of little absurdities and small surrealisms that seem to pass without notice. For [...]
After nights of fieldwork, ethnographers have to make their way home. For me, after I get off the metro, the walk looks like this: Except that the first time I try to take this picture, the camera focuses on the lines in the the bench where I propped my camera. When we correct for this [...]
Dozens of copies of this poster have been put up at the University of Paris-8. (Photo by Imen I., a student in sociological methods at Paris-8.)