Culture is dead ...

... long live culture. Especially in an era where the struggle to survive and reproduce is basically finished.

Culture for demography and vice versa

It is easy to see the culture as input version.

The demography as input should concentrate on the radicalizing potential of "etic" population knowledge.

Social diffusion, entropy, intimacy -- random thoughts

There is a need for differentiation if class struggle is a basic characteristic of history. We should consider how difficult it is to maintain such differentiation, given the basic entropic thing of the universe.

We should separately analyze biological differentiation (age, gender, IQ), contrasted with differentiation based on socially constructed shallow properties (race, accent), contrasted with socially constructed deep properties (education, protein at a young age).

What properties of a behavior and a context encourage that behavior to transpose, and what discourages such transposition? How does a person pre-consciously see a behavior as adopt-able?

Diffusion is a function of intimacy rather than proximity - this is a fatal flaw in much analysis, as pointed out in last weeks bacpop - even though intimacy is largely a function of spatial structure (simple proximity is, perhaps, a misrecognition device). This is why, in a way, ethnography is so radical: bodies are put into contact. But mere contact is not enough (Aronson and Musharaf) - cooperating toward outcomes is the best (yes, Dasein is its future). Also, cultural diffusion depends to a large degree on the background practices (Heidegger and Wittgenstein and Bourdieu and Panofsky), rather than on any statements that can explicitly formulated.

The opportunities for intimacy in a neighborhood are radically different than 100 years ago; thus the stake in neighborhood segregation are much less. The importance of race to class is also much less; again less stake in race, though class is as important as ever.

BACPOP guy: we assume hierarchies of spaces. Whatever that means.

Geographic scale morality

A device of the class struggle is to co-opt locally moral choices to support globally immoral structures; I think of school teachers sorting students as best they can, and really trying to help some, and not others who don't seem like a payoff.

I think space can be used to engineer this partitioning and specialization of morality - by making sure that people who have morally clean lives don't share space with some people who are not so clean, we can do the misrecognition necessary for capitalism etc.

Dissertation titles

A theory of culture for demographers, revisited.

Culture influences on household formation in a small town.

Culture and family in a small town.

Words and Bodies.

Demography of intimate institutions.

Iconic transposition of behaviors

I need to revisit my Bourdieu, but I wonder what iconic things are good candidates for jumping between spheres of life, a la Panofsky. How does a narrative get actualized? How does a dichotomy of male/ female physically structure a house? Are there semiotic aspects of certain schemas that make these schemas more or less susceptible to jumping? Are there typical transformations that happen in a jump?

What are the semiotic details of the "referential totality"?

In a small town, it seems that the "referential whole" is more "whole"...

"Why can't he just choose to change his patterns?"

Somebody said this to us last night apropos of a close friend who engaged in what appears to be really stupid, self-destructive behavior, over and over again. She seemed to think that it was as simple as choosing what to have for dinner; if not that simple, it was as simple as quitting smoking.

But I think "choosing to X" in these three cases (patterns, smoking, and dinner) is completely different. Choosing what to have for dinner is easy and really is a discrete choice with so few entailments and ramifications that it is easy to understand (maybe using a Kahneman etc framework for determining the preference structure, etc). Choosing to quit smoking (or, say, doing heroin) is as easy to *choose* as dinner insofar as it is easy to name and conceptualize, but such a choice involves huge ramifications and readjustments and thus is quite tricky.

As far as choosing to change patterns - can one even make a "choice" about such a diffuse thing? Perhaps to make a choice one has to be able to objectify through language a bunch of options, each of which has a label? (Note that one can start to act differently without making such an explicit choice, so I am not talking about all possible actions, just a certain type of action.) Choosing a new referential whole means thematizing the referential whole as a whole. This thematization might be possible with the modern novel (!), but it is very, very difficult.


Random thought on the future and Dasein and LH in my fieldsite: if we classify all the transition reasons, 80% or so them are forward looking -- in order to get married, etc. I am sure a few people might say "in order to get away from blah", but that is both rare and evidence of a big problem in a person's life. Even if it is true, I don't think my interviewees often put their decision in terms of ending something. Interesting.