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Karl Andersson

Anthropologist

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The white family

February 27, 2020 by Karl Leave a Comment

When you meet people on the streets of Tokyo, you divert slightly, and the person you meet likewise diverts slightly, in order to give the other space. It’s a mutual show of respect. But as I was walking down the busy street at Naka-Okachimachi last night, I was made aware of a group of people who didn’t budge. I diverted as usual of course, but these apparently rude and careless people didn’t. Only as we met did I raise my gaze to have a look at them.

It was a white family. Coming out from their hotel, they were walking down the street as a company of feudal lords, having every Japanese person they met divert for them. What made the whole scene even more interesting was that the family was completely unaware of everyone else on the street giving them space.

They were just an ordinary family: Father, mother, a girl and a boy in their teens. The boy had an uninterested look on his face, you could maybe call it spoiled. Because here he was, disinterested as teenagers can be, but even in the most mundane of situations he unquestioningly accepted his right to be part of this royal cortège that made its way through Naka-Okachimachi, having everyone else symbolically bow to them in the form of careful diverting.

The scene can be analysed in many ways, not least as the faux pas of tourists everywhere, but what I saw was an example of white privilege: No matter how commonplace you might be, you are still superior and ready to be served by the rest of the world.

Now maybe a Brazilian or Indian family would behave in a similar way, but it would be for different reasons. And certainly no one budges on the streets of Neukölln, but that too is for other reasons. In Neukölln there is an awareness of the street as a battlefield, where meeting other people is an intricate gameplay. I think the essence of whiteness is the unawareness of it, the unconscious assumption of being superior.

Filed Under: Snippet Tagged With: whiteness

Uninteresting books as eye-openers

January 30, 2020 by Leave a Comment

Have you ever read a book that “should” be right up your alley, but it wasn’t? You find it dry and too detailed, yes, simply boring. But in the end you realise that it’s not the book that is at fault – it is you. Or rather, your lack of interest in this area.

This recently happened to me. I had a very hard time getting through the second half of the book (but I did it of course, true to my almost autistic need to “close” things). I thought it was way too detailed. But after a while I realised that I would have wanted all those details if it was a subject that truly interested me.

This is a good realisation. Sometimes we’re too stuck to our self-images. We might have had an interest for many years, been active in certain movements, and so on. But never really bloomed in them, always taking part on the sidelines. Well, reading a really “boring” book on the subject might be the eye-opener we need. It was for me. I’m still very sympathetic to the causes, it’s just that I’ve admitted to myself that I, to be very honest, don’t care about them. There I said it.

So this will be the last book on this subject for me, and that feels like a relief. When one area goes, another comes. Interests change over a lifetime. But we can’t be tuned in to the exact level of interest at every particular point in time. Instead, we stop to gauge the interest levels every once in a while, and that’s what this book forced me to do.

So yes, it’s a relief, and it’s a good feeling to delve even deeper in the area that truly interests me.

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Clarks shoes at Galeria Kaufhof: Comfort in your soul

The commodification of the Other

November 21, 2019 by Karl Leave a Comment

Clarks shoes at Galeria Kaufhof: Comfort in your soul

I saw this campaign by British shoe company Clarks in the window display of Galeria Kaufhof at Alexanderplatz, Berlin, in November 2018. It features black models and the slogan “Comfort in your soul”.

I snapped some photos because I thought it was a good example of how black people are often used in advertising to represent values like authenticity, closeness to nature and soul, simplicity and comfort – all the things that the presumably white potential customer might feel that they lack in their busy life.

I was reminded of this campaign when I read bell hooks for our upcoming class in Images, Race and Representation (my emphasis):

The acknowledged Other must assume recognizable forms. Hence, it is not African American culture formed in resistance to contemporary situations that surfaces, but nostalgic evocation of a “glorious” past. And even though the focus is often on the ways that this past was “superior” to the present, this cultural narrative relies on stereotypes of the “primitive,” even as it eschews the term, to evoke a world where black people were in harmony with nature and with one another. This narrative is linked to white western conceptions of the dark Other, not to a radical questioning of those representations.

In the next paragraph she could have been talking about this very campaign, but of course the examples are endless:

Should youth of any other color not know how to move closer to the Other, or how to get in touch with the “primitive,” consumer culture promises to show the way. It is within the commercial realm of advertising that the drama of Otherness finds expression. Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger. In the cultural marketplace the Other is coded as having the capacity to be more alive, as holding the secret that will allow those who venture and dare to break with the cultural anhedonia (defined in Sam Keen’s The Passionate Life as “the insensitivity to pleasure, the incapacity for experiencing happiness”) and experience sensual and spiritual renewal.

More on othering later (cause I have a lot to say about it).

hooks, bell. 1992. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” In Black Looks: Race and Representation: 370. Cambridge: South End Press.

Filed Under: Snippet Tagged With: bell hooks, othering, whiteness

Organic desire

August 1, 2019 by Leave a Comment

This excerpt from an article in Wired on artificial intelligence contained something that I can’t get out of my head (my emphasis):

This future doesn’t keep Etzioni up at night. He’s not worried about AI becoming maliciously superintelligent. “We’re worried about something taking over the world,” he scoffs, “that can’t even on its own decide to play chess again.” It’s not clear how an AI would develop a desire to do so or what that desire would look like in software. Deep learning can conquer chess, but it has no inborn will to play.

It’s obvious to us that AI doesn’t have desire, but making it explicit what AI lacks at the same time specifies what humans have. So desire is one of the things that defines us as humans, or maybe as organic beings since animals have desire too – what about plants?

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I want to explore

January 25, 2019 by Leave a Comment

I read a column by Lucy Jones, which she ended with a verse by the American poet Mary Oliver, who died last week:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

My answer would be:

I want to explore.

Like a boy on an uninhabited island, I want to explore and map the unknown. That’s what I want my wild and precious life to be: A neverending curiosity. And isn’t that what not only anthropology but science in general is about? The zest of trying to find out.

Walter Pater captured it in this famous quote, which has been my beacon ever since I found it:

To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

Filed Under: Discussion, Snippet

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Unreal Boys - a film about shotacon

Unreal Boys is my graduation film. It’s a documentary about three young men in Tokyo who like the Japanese comic genre shotacon. Read more.

Tiling short film

Tiling is a short film that I made as part of a semester paper. Read more and watch it here.

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