It Wasn't Me

I like to take the Metro in São Paulo, but the congestion makes often makes it a very frustrating experience.  São Paulo has some of the most crowded subways in the world....

 I often find that I go on a sort of automatic pilot when I am on a particularly crowded subway car. I try to think of something else, but I also make sure that I know where my wallet is and that I will make my stop, which usually involves inching towards the door at least once stop prior. 

Theories of the crowd emphasize the depersonalizing (Le Bon), imitative (Tarde) and tactile (Canetti) character of urban crowds. In other words, in a crowd one loses oneself to the sheer sensory overload (also called synaesthesia), and enters into collective behavior.  My experience on these packed subways cars is that, yes, crowd sociality takes over, but that people often resist it like a young child fighting sleepiness. The packed subway car is a particularly dystopic kind of crowd, connected as it is to regimes of urban planning and wage labor that make crowded mass transit unpleasurable.  Being on a packed subway car at noon is a very different experience than being packed in at a late night music venue (although some crumudgeons might beg to differ). 

Read more about my adventures on the subway below the fold. 

My week that was....

Apologies to those who don't speak Portuguese, but this is an amazing news mashup, and it is also a good lesson in how the public sphere operates and the slipperiness of signifiers from one news story to the next.

The first story is about how the banca evagenlica, or the Evangelical caucus in the Brazilian Congress has managed to block the addition of sexual orientation into Brazil's non-discrimination law.  (This is also known as PLC 122, or the 'criminalization of homophobia.')  The reporters have fun with the comments of far-right opposition to the bill calling it the beginning of an "imperialismo gay."  The second story is about a protest that took  second story is about the proposed metro stop for the 6th metro line (not scheduled to be built until 2020!) that was supposed to go through the rich neighborhood of higienopolis.  In the video, a lot of rich residents explain how the metro stop would only bring potheads and criminals to their "traditional" neighborhood (because says one lady, these are the people who hang out at metro stops).  Another lady in sunglasses (gotta love her), explains how, although her maid takes 3 busses to get to her house, people like her maid still don't know how to use a subway, so it wouldn't really help anyways.  In response to this, a huge protest yesteday blocked the intersection in this neighborhood where the metro is supposed to go and had a hoedown for fabulous people (churrascão da gente diferenciada), where they made fun of these residents (and called them worse names then snobs).  Note that the title of the video is called imperio gay vs. gente diferenciada, which shows how people consume stories like these together, and as part of a wider field of Brazilian class and sex politics. The other two stories are about the rising price of gasoline and the very controversial plan to open up more land in the Amazon to cattle raising (mostly for export to Russia and other fast developing economies).

Plus, they play "Common People" during the metro story.  What's not to love!

The Impossibility of Imponderabilia

Before you assume too much from the title of this post, fear not.  The impossibility of imponderabilia is not the end but the new beginning of this blog. 

In March, I wrote that this blog would record the thoughts and observations I had on everyday life in São Paulo.  I imagined that these observations would come from stolen moments, when and where the sheer enormity of life in a new location would foster acts of passive contemplation.  I imagined that the mise-en-scenes that I would write here would work both with and against the ethnographic information that I was gathering in my "proper research."  In contrast, I imagined this part of the ethnographic experience to be somewhat improper, counter-methodological, and hence somewhat illicit and exciting.

My ambiguous relationship towards imponderabilia is, of course, at the heart the of anthropological and ethnographic traditions.  Imponderabilia, as I read Malinowski's advocation for it, is both the content that enfleshes social structure and the filter through which it becomes available.  The only way out of imponderabilia was to give oneself over to it.  As Malinowski envisioned, you sit around long enough in one place, and the world begins to unfold itself around you.  Imponderabilia is thus less a methodology, and more a mobilization of aesthetic and epistemological first principles.* 

Mobilizing imponderabilia seems to be more and more difficult in contemporary anthropology, working in post-industrial sites, and using modern methods.  Urban anthropology, globalization, multi-sited and scale-jumping research, networks, media circulation, etc. appear to emphasize mobilities that require the anthropologist to chase after the site instead of remaining in it.  Repeated in many forms, the new wisdom seems to be, the techniques anthropologists used in the village just won't work any more.  To a large extent, I agree, and would add that we would be remiss to treat villiage-ify any of these sites instead of letting the mode of study emerge from the reconfigured site itself.

Nevertheless, I find it necessary to understand why impoderabilia fails in many contemporary ethnographic projects.  And I want to take my own experiences as a point of reflection on this.

[More Under the Fold!]