(Opinion, crossposted from Brainstorm)
If the presidential race has truly become a “culture war” (a claim that many pundits have been making since Sarah Palin’s emergence on the national scene), why not ask an anthropologist to weigh in, especially since that academic field (particularly in its American incarnation) was partially responsible for the definition of “culture” that now gets deployed in such talk? This is the notion of culture as a total way of life, as the everyday practices and unexamined beliefs that grease the wheels for commonsensical knowing.
If culture is “second nature,” the anthropologist is supposed to be a kind of second-order naturalist exposing all the many silent and profoundly powerful ways in which culture can pass itself off as biologically given.
But in this contemporary discussion of “culture wars,” anthropologists tend to have little real role to play. In the era of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, anthropologists were accepted as decidedly public intellectuals. But that was then. Now, anthropologists have a truncated role in these “culture wars,” trapped in the fray as, say, some of those “tenured radicals” demonized as un-American and hypocritical by many detractors on the political right.
Of course, a lot of people have a stake in this election, a take on why Obama-Biden or McCain-Palin would be best for America. (Many anthropologists do as well, even if they don’t all agree on the better ticket.) And cultural assumptions definitely inform those stakes and opinions—in conscious and subconscious ways.
The so-called Sarah Palin Effect is probably one-part real (a reflection of actual American sympathies recalibrating around a second charismatic politician) and one-part media concoction (passing itself off as a mere journalistic reflection of “the people” and their changing investments). This Palin Effect is also a function of both race and gender, class and culture. You hear pundits talking, constantly, about the idea that many white women have left the Obama camp since the unveiling of Palin. There are the notions, rising to a crescendo these last few days, that polls seem to be shifting McCain’s way, especially in battleground states. Democrats have also lost their advantage on “the economy,” some claim, even with today’s Lehman Brothers news. Pundits have been scratching their heads and asking how any of this is even possible.
I would argue that there is no “economy” driving this campaign, at least not if by that we mean a pre-spun objective fact that is supposed to translate simplistically and mechanically into people’s recognizable self-interest. Nothing’s the matter with Kansas, or Kansans. They’re just like all of us. We don’t vote from some easy and conspicuous pre-cultural self-interest; we vote for the irrational cultural interests that we’ve been taught to treat naturally.
People are asking, what do women want? How could a female Clinton supporter back McCain? Because women are “angry,” we are told, about (among other things) what happened to Hillary Clinton during the primaries. Palin is also so likable, they say. Compelling. Charismatic. These, I would argue, might be wonderfully delicious euphemisms.
I heard a recent pundit offer up a compelling discussion about the extent to which Sarah Palin has made gender the new race, by which they meant that gender is doing a great deal of work to galvanize an electorate and to Teflon the Republican ticket from political attack (the way pundits once thought that race was supposed to protect Obama).
Of course, the thing to realize is that this isn’t a zero sum game. Gender is always the modality through which race and racism are felt, even as gender (and Geraldine Ferraro and Gloria Steinem both flatfootedly and imprecisely tried to make this point during the Democratic campaign season) is the modality through which race functions, even if race sometimes seems to obscure gender’s co-presence.
Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels offers a provocative argument about the extent to which literary myths of Americana moved from an emphasis on the possibility of an inter-racial (if hierarchical) American family to more racialized forms of exclusive American whiteness.
According to Benn Michaels (and this is a quick-and-dirty gloss on the specifics of his argument), America used to be imagined as a multiracial family that included blacks and whites. The blacks were relegated to a kind of subordinately “fictive kinship,” as maids or nannies that were paternalistically included in the family unit, even if there was still a little asterisk next to their names. By the mid-19th century, America started to reconstitute its sense of self as a white nation without any form of allowable racial difference at all. The nation defined itself against the very possibility of multiracial inclusion. In both instances (multiracial versions of American family life vs. the idea of white families purged of racial contamination), race and gender function together to bolster these mutually exclusive conclusions about how America is (and should be) constituted.
The so-called Palin effect is a movement of race and gender at the selfsame time. And examining how the family and “family values” function (by framing those linkages between race and gender) in this election is key. Is it a notion of “family” that would imagine the “real” America as a monoracial unit that beats back the threats of an encroaching multiracial nation and world—threats that can no longer be fully discussed in explicitly racial terms at all?
