{"id":1413,"date":"2010-05-14T13:35:26","date_gmt":"2010-05-14T12:35:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=1413"},"modified":"2010-05-14T13:35:26","modified_gmt":"2010-05-14T12:35:26","slug":"the-activist-poise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2010\/05\/14\/the-activist-poise\/","title":{"rendered":"The activist poise"},"content":{"rendered":"

In case you wondered what campus activists look like in Aix, here are some people who were distributing tracts for the election I wrote about earlier<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This fellow was from UNEF. As I asked to take his picture, an older man he was talking to edged back out of the frame, and the activist drew himself up in a sort of pose.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The local leader of the Mouvement \u00c9tudiant. I think he was sort of like the boss of the other M\u00e9t militants; one of them later stopped talking to me because, he said, he was afraid the boss would be annoyed he wasn’t giving out fliers. I’m struck by the definite posed look here too. I guess you can’t just ask to take people’s photos and then expect them to not<\/em> pose.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This person sitting at the left-wing F\u00e9d\u00e9ration Syndicale \u00c9tudiant table was actually from the CGT (a larger labor union). He wanted to know what the labor situation was like in the US. Looks a little more relaxed than the others, perhaps in part because he’s sitting down.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A militant from the Conf\u00e9d\u00e9ration \u00c9tudiante.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A trashcan by the student election tables labeled “trashcan for tracts” where you could throw your political fliers once you’d voted. I guess we should applaud their dedication to recycling, but it somehow seemed funny that ten yards from where they gave out the tracts, there was a place for you to throw them away. These tracts have a very short lifecycle and duration of meaningfulness, it would appear.<\/p>\n

I have to remind myself at times that an anthropologist’s careful scrutiny of a local artifact like a tract is totally alien to the inattentive, half-bored way that most students seemed to regard them. Very few tracts are actually read, people say here. Some people throw them out immediately, without even looking, as if the only reason they accept them to begin with is to humor the people distributing them. Others refuse them outright \u2014 which seems far more honest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In case you wondered what campus activists look like in Aix, here are some people who were distributing tracts for the election I wrote about earlier. This fellow was from UNEF. As I asked to take his picture, an older man he was talking to edged back out of the frame, and the activist drew […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[488,495,496],"tags":[689],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}