Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Sociology

  • mister gotcha trend-lord douchebag

    Trends Discourse is a genre unto itself, I have discovered lately, as I try to sustain some sort of engagement with what is arguably an adjacent profession to my own. But the self-satisfaction of its leading pundits, and the lack of reflexivity thereby implied, can make for some serious eyeroll material. Exhibit A is this…

  • like a shadow anticipating its own body

    From the opening chapter of Wild Thought, being a fresh translation of the book by Levi-Strauss which was first translated as The Savage Mind: We should not, for all this, fall back on the vulgar thesis (which is however, admissible in the narrow perspective in which it is situated) that magic is a timorous and…

  • Au ‘voir, Oncle Bruno

    Very sad to hear about Bruno Latour’s passing on Sunday—though perhaps not exactly surprised, as I was aware he’d been wrestling with some form of cancer for a while. I’m not a good enough philosopher or theorist to talk eloquently of his position in and influence upon various fields of knowledge, except to note that…

  • as if there was necessarily just one transition

    Graeber and Wengrove again, referring to archaeological evidence from the soi disant ‘Fertile Crescent’: If the situation in just one cradle of early farming was that complicated, then surely it no longer makes sense to ask, ‘what were the social implications of the transition to farming?’ — as if there was necessarily just one transition,…

  • a position of negligible influence

    Given my line of work, I should probably be among the many people who scour the latest missives from the IPCC as soon as they drop. My reasons for not doing so are two-fold. Firstly, I’m very short of time, and scanning 800+ pages of written-by-committee material in order to confirm the details of what…