From Round to Square (and back)

For The Emperor's Teacher, scroll down (↓) to "Topics." It's the management book that will rock the world (and break the vase, as you will see). Click or paste the following link for a recent profile of the project: http://magazine.beloit.edu/?story_id=240813&issue_id=240610

A new post appears every day at 12:05* (CDT). There's more, though. Take a look at the right-hand side of the page for over four years of material (2,000 posts and growing) from Seinfeld and country music to every single day of the Chinese lunar calendar...translated. Look here ↓ and explore a little. It will take you all the way down the page...from round to square (and back again).
*Occasionally I will leave a long post up for thirty-six hours, and post a shorter entry at noon the next day.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Seinfeld Ethnography (35)—Smoking Kramer

Click below for all "Seinfeld Ethnography" posts: 
Marine Biologist         The Doorman          Opposite George   Newman's Mail   The Bootleg         Marriage
Just Dessert               Sleep Desk             Late Coffee            High Stakes        Motor Oil              Downtown 
Code Cracking           Nonfat Yogurt          Bad Boy                 It's Not You         I Can't Be...          Exploding Wallet
Elaine Flies Coach    The Close Talker     The Alliance           Broccoli               Coated Culture    Dinner Party
George's Friend        Jerry's Haircut          Face Paint             Mustachioed       Smoking              East River
Pool Man                   Dunkin' Joe              Life Lessons          Reckoning          Dog Medicine      Shower Heads
Looking Busy            George Tips             Kramer's Job          Empty Tank
Click here for the reference to the "Argonauts" title, below.
Argonauts of the Seinfeldian Specific 
Kramer's smoking. He lights up in the restaurant. "It bothers people, and it's against the law" he's told. So he opens his apartment to smokers. Take a look.


"Why does Radio Shack ask for your phone number when you buy batteries?...I don't know." "What happened to your face? It looks like an old catcher's mitt." "Look away. I'm...I'm hideous."

These are just some of the matters I would like to examine today on Seinfeld Ethnography. First, we have Kramer's conspiracy theories and carcinogenic echoes of liberty for all. Opening his apartment to smokers might be a 1990s version of Alfred E. Smith providing turkeys at the holidays for voters. He is a man of the people, and he feels their alveoli.
[b] Cigar night RF
Yet, in a mere half week, he pays a price. Even as happy transients smoke away in his apartment, Kramer is changing...changing. This most giving of men (who has transformed his living quarters—giving the shirt off his back and the nicotine off his butt to his fellows—into a smoking lounge) has transformed. In seventy-two hours, he has become a Wildean image-in-reverse. His actions are angelic (at least for a cross-section of urban smokers), but his visage is ravaged. Jerry says so, and his mien is mangled, his guise garbled, and his countenance countenanced. His face looks bad and his teeth look worse. He is, by the end of the episode, a marled borough man, riding high above the Manhattan skyline.
***  ***
[c] Universal RF
Our readings for today blend literature with literary anthropology and straight ethnography. I have three selections. You might have guessed the first. I cannot resist a passage from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. If you have read it, you know exactly what I mean. If you have not, now is the time. The quotation is a "spoiler," but it is so famous in modern English literature that I cannot imagine that I am spoiling much. It is a perfect bookend to Kramer's "Look away...I'm hideous" line. From there, we will look at tobacco myths in Claude Lévi-Struass's second (of four) volume on mythology, From Honey to Ashes. Finally, we'll look at an ethnography of northern China and the cigarette culture at work in almost all male bonding.


Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! Al his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure, swift penalty along with it. here was purification in punishment. Not 'forgive us our sins', but 'Smite us for our iniquities' should be the prayer of a man to a most just god.
[d] Mirrored ADV

The curiously-carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids laughed round it as of old. He took it up, as he had done on that night of horror, when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished shield. Once, someone who had terribly loved him had written to him a mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: 'The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.' The phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself. Then he loathed his own beauty, and, flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.[1]

Claude Lévi-Strauss
From Honey to Ashes (1966)
[e] Tobacco ADV
The methods of using tobacco may be varied, but the same is true of the intended result. Tobacco is consumed either individually or collectively: either in solitude, or by two or several people together; and either purely for pleasure or for ritualistic purposes which may have to do with magic or religion. A sick man is sometimes treated by being made to inhale tobacco fumes. Or someone about to be initiated, or to become a priest or healer is purified by being made to imbibe greater or lesser quantities of tobacco juice in order to induce vomiting, followed sometimes by a loss of consciousness. Lastly, tobacco is used to make offerings of leaves or smoke by which it is hoped to attract the attention of the Spirits and communicate with them.

And so, like honey, tobacco, the profane use of which allows it to be classed as food, can in its other functions possess the exactly opposite characteristic: It can act as an emetic and even as a poison. It has been confirmed that a Mundurucu myth about the origin of honey is careful to distinguish these two aspects. The same is true of a myth about the origin of tobacco, belonging to the Iranxé or Münkü, a small tribe who live in a region to the south of the Mundurucu:

      M191. Iranxé (Münkü). 'The origin of tobacco'
      A man had behaved badly towards another man, who was determined to take his
      revenge. Using a fruit-gathering expedition as a pretext, the latter got his enemy
      to climb a tree, and there he left him, after removing the pole that had been used
      to make the ascent. This prisoner, who was starving, thirsty and emaciated, caught
      sight of a monkey and called to it for help; the monkey agreed to bring him some
      water, but claimed to be too weak to help him get down. A thin, foul-smelling
      urubu (vulture), succeeded in rescuing him and took him back to its home. It was
      the master of tobacco, of which it possessed two kinds, one good and the other
      poisonous. It presented them to its progégé so that he could learn to smoke the
      former and use the latter as a means of revenge. When the hero returned to the
      village, he gave the bad tobacco to his persecutor who was seized with a fit of
      giddiness and changed into an ant-eater. The hero went after him and, having
      come upon him unawares in broad daylight when he was asleep, killed him. He
      invited his benefactor, the urubu, to eat its fill of the decayed corpse.

The above myth, of which we possess only this one obscure and elliptical version, is extremely interesting on several counts. It is a myth about the origin of tobacco which, as I had already postulated (and confirmed in the case of the Chaco myths on the same subject), reflects myths about the origin of fire: the hero is a fruit-picker (homologous with the bird-nester) stranded at the top of a tree and saved by a fearsome animal (ferocious like the jaguar, or revolting like the urubu) in which the hero bravely places his trust, and which is master of a cultural advantage, as yet unknown to man, that it bestows upon him: cooking fire in the one instance, tobacco in the other, which we know to be a food like cooked meat, although the way in which it is consumed places it beyond cooking...[2]

Andrew Kipnis
Guest/Host Etiquette and Banquets (1997)
[f] Etiquette ADV
After everyone sat down, hosts almost always offered tea, cigarettes, and sometimes small snacks like melon seeds, watermelon (during the summer), and (especially at weddings) candy. Hosts did not ask guests if they wanted these tidbits, and guests were expected to gracefully accept them. The informality of asking if someone wanted something and refusing it if one didn't was reserved for everyday situations among friends and relatives. Informality implied a close guanxi. A demand for informality from a distant guest was both rude and prohibited the guanxi-producing practices through which distance could be overcome. Cook Feng explained that people don't smoke and drink alone and told me a popular local saying, "wine and tobacco aren't split among households (jiuyan bufenjia), implying that one shouldn't be too possessive with wine and tobacco. As media of ganqing, tobacco and wine had to be shared to be effective.

During my first summer in the village this practice presented me with a problem. As long as I drank tea, I could use my foreignness to excuse my inability to smoke. However, during one period stomach problems convinced me to also avoid tea. In my next household visit, i insisted that I didn't smoke and didn't want tea. Though tolerant enough not to be mad, my host commented, "How can you both not smoke and not drink tea? If you don't smoke and don't drink tea, what do you do?" I had made myself a social cripple. By not accepting cigarettes and tea, I was refusing to participate in the creation of good ganqing and hence in the establishment of guanxi. I quickly learned to always accept tea, but also found it was not necessary to drink much.[3]

Notes
[1] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 1949), 244.
[2] Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of Mythology:2 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 60-61.
[3] Andrew Kipnis, Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China Village (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 46.

Bibliography
Kipnis, Andrew. Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China Village. Durham 
          NC: Duke University Press, 1997.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. From Honey to Ashes: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: 2. New York: 
          Harper & Row, 1973.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: Penguin Modern Classics, 1949.
Wednesday, January 18th
Swimming in the East River
The pool is crowded, so Kramer has another idea. Cultural theory will never be the same.

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