I was reading\u00a0through my field notebooks lately and I came across a little ethnographic snippet of description.\u00a0It is a description of a male French student sitting in a classroom and getting bored.\u00a0The more bored he got, the more he\u00a0seemed to invent new ways to exhibit and alleviate his\u00a0boredom. His boredom\u00a0became generative,\u00a0I would almost say. It seemed to try to overcome itself.<\/p>\n
\nWhat, then, is boredom as a practice?<\/em><\/p>\n
To stack two pens one on the next.<\/p>\n
To roll the pens in the pen case, a Mexican folk art\/hippie-esque knit bag with a dark zipper.<\/p>\n
To test a pen.<\/p>\n
To put new ink in it.<\/p>\n
To try to wipe off the ink with a whiteout marker.<\/p>\n
To cradle the back of the neck in your palm.<\/p>\n
To send an SMS, surreptitiously, keeping your phone mostly still in your pocket.<\/p>\n
To sigh and lean back, one arm crossed, in white t-shirt and jeans.<\/p>\n
To put one foot up on the chair to retie your shoelace.<\/p>\n
To sit sidesaddle in your seat.<\/p>\n
To stare intently at the ethnographer\u2019s notebook, looking away when the ethnographer glances at you.<\/p>\n
To look at the ethnographer\u2019s notebook again as soon as he lets his guard down…<\/p>\n
[Field notebook V, p.35]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Anthropologists have sometimes claimed that\u00a0when\u00a0ethnographic subjects “look back” at the ethnographer, that this\u00a0is\u00a0almost a political act: a way of challenging the power relationship\u00a0that normally sets the observer up and\u00a0over the person being observed. Here I’m not sure that that’s what it was. Here I think that looking\u00a0over the ethnographer’s shoulder at their notebook was more of an attempt to\u00a0escape the tedium<\/em> of a local situation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was reading\u00a0through my field notebooks lately and I came across a little ethnographic snippet of description.\u00a0It is a description of a male French student sitting in a classroom and getting bored.\u00a0The more bored he got, the more he\u00a0seemed to invent new ways to exhibit and alleviate his\u00a0boredom. His boredom\u00a0became generative,\u00a0I would almost say. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2092,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[493,494],"tags":[532,699],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064"}],"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=2064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2091,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064\/revisions\/2091"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}