In this month’s issue of The Atlantic (which is  n o w h e r e  in its pages called “The Atlantic Monthly”), Graeme Wood has an interesting piece, “Anthropology Inc,” about “a new trend in market research” embodied by a consulting outfit called ReD. Sounds pernicious, doesn’t it! But let’s set the ethical problems to one side for the moment. What’s interesting is not so much the deployment of trained anthropologists to the field of American consumers, but the way in which their extensive interviews can be culturally interpreted. 

Much of what I encountered while shadowing ReD’s consultants seemed like the type of insight that any observant intereviewer might have produced with or without an anthropology degree…

Graeme may be overlooking the possibility that journalists are parallel anthropologists themselves. I agree that any intelligent person could do the field work. Something more is called for, I suspect, when the reports are analyzed, and Wood’s story contains a great example. Wood accompanies a young, Turkish-born woman, Esra Ozkan, when she interviews a Forest Hills housewife who keeps not one but two kosher kitchens. Ozkan, who although fully familiar with kosher practice (her husband is Jewish, for one thing) asks the housewife to explain it, is able to infer from their lengthy conversation that, even though she says nothing of the kind, the housewife “treats the kitchen as a holy place.” What she does in her everyday kitchen (not to mention the one that’s reserved for Passover) is rigorously kosher. But when she goes out to dinner, she is not so strict, and she confesses that her husband does not keep kosher at all when she is not around. This woman’s observance of the ancient rules is rooted not so much in the pursuit of ritual purity, it seems, as it is in the creation of a domestic shrine to her Judaism. It is as though she has created a simulacrum of the Temple in her home. Everyone in the household must to some extent be aware of this — but almost certainly not to the degree of articulating what might sound like blasphemy.

Bronislaw Malinowski wrote of “the imponderabilia of daily life,” Wood reminds us, meaning the minute details, of many of which we’re unaware, that govern our social behavior (even when we’re alone, as when keeping house). Are we better off not knowing these things? My hunch is that, although it can be painful to find out why you do the things you do, it’s ultimately beneficial, and certainly simplifying.

I am much caught up, these days, in the imponderabilia of my library. Why do I have the books that I have? Why really? I ought to point out that I conceive of the library as a social space, because it is here that I meet the ideas of others and am inspired to sharpen my own before I write them down. I am also interested in the imponderabilia of my own culinary life. Why am I sometimes “too tired to cook”? What takes the flavor out of cooking, and leaves only the drudgery? Is it just fatigue? Laziness? What are the occult paramaters that send me into the kitchen or keep me out of it? I’d like to call up the ReD people and see if they could tease some answers out of me. I might be very surprised.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2013 at 8:00 am.