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.
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.
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.
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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.
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| [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)
From Honey to Ashes (1966)
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| [e] Tobacco ADV |
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)
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]
Bibliography
Kipnis, Andrew. Producing Guanxi: Sentiment, Self, and Subculture in a North China Village. Durham Guest/Host Etiquette and Banquets (1997)
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| [f] Etiquette ADV |
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.
[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
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.
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| [g] Safety RF |
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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