I’ve been spending this entire week in San Francisco, attending the American Anthropological Association’s annual conference. Most academics know exactly what the drill entails at such events, a mixture of informal schmoozing (and catching up with old friends) along with more high-stakes panel presentations or (if you’re lucky and a grad student) getting summoned to attend the cattle-call that is on-site job interviewing.

I took part in a few different conference events/activities this week: (i) responding to a new book by sociologist Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, which attempts to challenge common assumptions about the “Americanization” of European poverty — i.e., the idea that European cities are growing into carbon copies of American “hyperghettos”; (ii) talking with several colleagues about the pros and cons of “public anthropology”/”anthropology as social critique”; and (iii) ...

Jack Bauer, one of television’s most famous counterterrorism experts, is back at it.

Fox’s newest season of 24 starts in January, but we get a prequel this weekend that connects the dots between the show’s last full season (in 2006) and its 2009 re-launch. Of course, 24 is most famous for its temporal conceit: Each episode is supposed to unfurl in real time (over 60 contiguous diegetic and extra-diegetic minutes), with the entire season transpiring during a single 24-hour period. That provides quite a few narrative challenges for the show’s staff, but it can create a sense of mounting tension (across episodes) that is rarely matched by other hour-long dramas.

And then there’s Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack.

Jack is supposed to represent a paradigmatic instantiation of American patriotism. His capacity for self-sacrifice is legion (and includes both personal and professional...

Pastor James Manning is a Harlem-based preacher (born and raised in North Carolina) who has become something of a youtube phenomonen this election season. Clips from his controversial sermons describing Barack Obama as “evil” and calling him “a long-legged Mack Daddy” who simply “pimps white women and black women” have gone viral this year, turning him into something of a media sensation. He even got a chance to do the national talk-show circuit, including an extended segment on Fox News that actually found right-winger Sean Hannity genuinely mortified by Manning’s demonizations of Obama (and his dismissals of Obama’s mother and father as “whoring trash”).

As someone who has conducted ethnographic research in Harlem, New York, I can say that Manning is quite recognizable to me as part of a vibrantly counter-cultural “Black Public Sphere” that often uses spiritual and religious...

Quentin Wolfsbane, NUT faculty-senate chair of parliamentary protocol, I.M. Wright Professor of Food Fetishism, and author of Totem and Tabouli

When I first started graduate school, several members of my incoming cohort conspired to create a kind of shadow “school” that was supposed to offer a satirical critique of what we thought about our earliest academic experiences. We had been reading work from the Collège de Sociologie in France, a group of intellectuals/iconoclasts from the 1930s (including Georges Bataille and Alexandre Kojeve) who organized themselves around a series of informal discussions and debates in response to their sense of the limitations and psychologizations of a surrealist movement that some of them had helped to create.

The Nepotistic University of Tropes was supposed to be a kind of counter-disciplining, a way for us to speak back to (and caricature) ...

D. L. Hughley has gotten a lot of heat for his new CNN comedy show, D. L. Hughley Breaks the News. The show is a combination of zany, over-the-top comedy sketches and humor-filled one-on-one interviews with pundits. The interviews are fine, even funny and provocative at times. But the sketches have really pushed some people’s buttons.

The YouTube excerpt above is from one of the show’s sketches, the one that has received some of the most vehement criticism. Hughley has Donnell Rawlings, a former Chappelle’s Show regular, playing a colorful pimp, Freddie Mac, trying to respond to public scorn about the government’s bailout of his operation. Rawlings can be a funny comedic actor, and I loved him on Dave Chappelle’s now-defunct Comedy Central show. But that’s part of the problem. Scenes like the one above come off as less-funny derivatives of Chappelle’s classic antics. That might...

Obama was supposed to be the racial candidate. He has the Kenyan father. He spent all of those years in an “Afrocentric” Chicago church. He was the student celebrated for being the first “Black” editor of Harvard’s Law Review, a first that served to push him onto the national stage even before he finished law school. (The contract for his memoir came as a function of this singular accomplishment at Harvard.)

But McCain lost this election because he was able to turn himself into the racial candidate.

Many analysts have written about the so-called “browning of the America,” the relative shrinking of this country’s white population as a function of demographic shifts linked to immigration and differential birth rates among racial/ethnic groups.

Obama ran his “post-racial” campaign with full appreciation of how such demographic shifts have also changed the makeup of the electorate. ...

I’m a native New Yorker who lives in Philadelphia. And with Pennsylvania serving as a pivotal swing state this time around, one that McCain still thinks he can win (in spite of poll numbers), I am living in the thick of the shenanigans that define our contemporary political moment.

This weekend, I received an automated telephone call telling me to disregard any earlier automated calls or flyers (of unknown origin) claiming that the city’s election polling stations would re-open on Wednesday morning, November 5th, to accommodate the record number of voters expected to cast their ballots this year. Of course, there is no November 5th voting in Philadelphia, and any calls/posters/flyers to the contrary are purposeful attempts to trick Philadelphians (disproportionately Democratic Philadelphians) into missing Tuesday’s election.

Now, you might dismissively (or jokingly) imagine that a...

“Let there be light.” God says those words, according to the book of Genesis, and the rest is human history.

For God, merely talking brings things into existence. His speech is ontology.

Watching hard-lined partisans this election season, the kinds of supporters doggedly unwilling to let the tiniest shreds of reasoned (or reasonable) analysis spoil their talking-pointed punditry, seems like a secularized version of that Biblically foundational moment.

Many pundits and partisans appear to imagine themselves with similar God-like powers, with the ability to speak things into being. It is as though simply saying something, and saying it definitely, makes it politically true — at least true enough, the hope is, to win over some of those voters still purportedly on the electoral fence. As I’ve argued in one of my previous posts, I suspect that the bulk of this oft-invoked fence (on...

Does graduating from Howard University, one of America’s historically black universities, put someone at a racial disadvantage? It is an old question, but some of my students are still asking it. To find an answer, I’d probably have to go back even farther than my college days — at least back to high school.

I graduated from Brooklyn Tech in the late 1980s. At the time, it was one of New York City’s three “specialized” public high schools, and students took a test to get in. Tech was (and still is) one of the largest public schools in the city. During my stint, we had about 5,000 students combined in all four grades — and a little under 1,000 in my graduating class.

Tech was an engineering/technical school, so most students were supposed to be preparing for jobs in some version of the hard sciences or their more practical occupational offshoots. We even had to choose majors; mine...

I had a long conversation with Essence magazine’s Jeannine Amber last month. She was working on a cover story about Beyonce Knowles, and she wanted to chat a bit about how celebrities negotiate fandom, its commonsensical expectations and its worst excesses.

Clearly, we obsess about celebrity, and we’ve been doing so for a long time now. But that erstwhile preoccupation has changed its features quite a lot in recent years. Reality TV, for one, has rewired our presumptions about citizens (famous or not) and their rights to privacy. It has also confounded some of our traditional assumptions about access to reality itself.

There are no conventional screenplays in Reality TV, few pre-fabbed lines for actors to memorize and recite. Scenes are supposed to be spontaneous, unscripted, and they are imagined to be all the more “real” as a consequence.

The current proliferation of...