Daniel Rosenblatt
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Research interests:
Cultural Performance; Self-Construction, Identity, & Practice; Global-Local Interrelationships; Local Modernities; New Zealand and Polynesian Ethnography; North American Ethnography & American Studies; Postcolonialism & Colonial History; Social Theory; Media Studies & Visual Anthropology; Indigenous Peoples’ Movements; Migration and Urbanization; Ritual; Visual Art; Countercultural Movements
About
I am a cultural anthropologist interested in social thought, contemporary critical and anthropological theory, and the history and ethnography of both the Pacific and the contemporary U.S. My Pacific research (with New Zealand Maori) is concerned with the performance and experience of local cultural traditions and identities in the context created by such transnational forces as capitalism, colonialism, modernity, and globalization. I also explore performances, identities, and experience in my U.S. work, which is currently centered on the ways people negotiate their relationship to the idea of “success.” In both cases I am interested in the interplay between ritual/symbolic constructions of the world and the possibilities for imagining political projects and attempting to achieve political agency. In NZ, this leads to a concern with the indigenization of such things as city life, development, and modernity as part of an effort to find a place for tradition in modern life and, in the U.S., I am interested in the logics and expressions of the pursuit (or refusal) of upward mobility.
Research
My dissertation (Houses and Hopes: Urban Marae and the Indigenization of Modernity in New Zealand) is an ethnographic and historical account of the “Maori Renaissance”—the revival of traditional culture by indigenous New Zealanders, who today live mainly in cities. In it, argue that the things Maori revive and the ends they hope to achieve are rooted in both the history of their relationship to New Zealand’s colonial settlers and in the understandings, values, and institutions that Maori brought to that encounter—rooted, in other words, in something akin to what anthropologists have traditionally called culture, albeit “culture” understood as a dynamic, historically changing ground for meaningful action. I focus on one institution, the marae, a complex of buildings centered on an elaborately carved meeting house that is thought of by Maori as an ancestor. Marae have long been central to rural, “traditional,” Maori life, but over the last thirty years there has been an explosion of marae construction, mainly in cities. Marae have come to play a key role in Maori attempts to regain their land, to preserve their language, and to win a place for their “culture” at the center of contemporary New Zealand life. Why are these houses the focus of struggle? I answer that question by showing how houses became institutionalized in the second half of the nineteenth century, emerging as both sites and emblems of Maori community life. Symbolically rich, the houses reflect and embody traditional conceptions of persons, groups, and the cosmos—they are inventions that are nevertheless outgrowths of tradition. Their presence today in settings that would otherwise be understood as belonging solely to the world of the settler state and global modernity reframes those settings, helping to maintain a distinct Maori world. I am currently at work on a book based on this material, tentatively called Houses and Hopes: Cultural Invention As Cultural Continuity
At present I am pursuing a number of projects: In the summer of 2005 I did preliminary fieldwork for a study of the recently established “Maori Television” network. This will allow me to explore further the ways in which Maori position themselves with respect to “popular culture,” both local and global. In the longer term I would like to examine the more explicitly political aspects of the “globalization of indigenousness,” both in terms of the concrete connections made between indigenous peoples in different places and in terms of the emergence of “indigenousness” as a perspective from which to criticize the contemporary world order (as among Mexican Zapatistas). While my previous published work on the U.S. has been about countercultural “resistance” involving body modification, my next project will address mainstream “middle class” life, specifically weddings, which I see as sites where Americans perform both their aspirations and their identities, and as places where the interrelation between cultural structures, specific historical moments, mass marketing, and public culture can be observed.
Research interests:
Cultural Performance; Self-Construction, Identity, & Practice; Global-Local Interrelationships; Local Modernities; New Zealand and Polynesian Ethnography; North American Ethnography & American Studies; Postcolonialism & Colonial History; Social Theory; Media Studies & Visual Anthropology; Indigenous Peoples’ Movements; Migration and Urbanization; Ritual; Visual Art; Countercultural Movements
About
I am a cultural anthropologist interested in social thought, contemporary critical and anthropological theory, and the history and ethnography of both the Pacific and the contemporary U.S. My Pacific research (with New Zealand Maori) is concerned with the performance and experience of local cultural traditions and identities in the context created by such transnational forces as capitalism, colonialism, modernity, and globalization. I also explore performances, identities, and experience in my U.S. work, which is currently centered on the ways people negotiate their relationship to the idea of “success.” In both cases I am interested in the interplay between ritual/symbolic constructions of the world and the possibilities for imagining political projects and attempting to achieve political agency. In NZ, this leads to a concern with the indigenization of such things as city life, development, and modernity as part of an effort to find a place for tradition in modern life and, in the U.S., I am interested in the logics and expressions of the pursuit (or refusal) of upward mobility.
Research
My dissertation (Houses and Hopes: Urban Marae and the Indigenization of Modernity in New Zealand) is an ethnographic and historical account of the “Maori Renaissance”—the revival of traditional culture by indigenous New Zealanders, who today live mainly in cities. In it, argue that the things Maori revive and the ends they hope to achieve are rooted in both the history of their relationship to New Zealand’s colonial settlers and in the understandings, values, and institutions that Maori brought to that encounter—rooted, in other words, in something akin to what anthropologists have traditionally called culture, albeit “culture” understood as a dynamic, historically changing ground for meaningful action. I focus on one institution, the marae, a complex of buildings centered on an elaborately carved meeting house that is thought of by Maori as an ancestor. Marae have long been central to rural, “traditional,” Maori life, but over the last thirty years there has been an explosion of marae construction, mainly in cities. Marae have come to play a key role in Maori attempts to regain their land, to preserve their language, and to win a place for their “culture” at the center of contemporary New Zealand life. Why are these houses the focus of struggle? I answer that question by showing how houses became institutionalized in the second half of the nineteenth century, emerging as both sites and emblems of Maori community life. Symbolically rich, the houses reflect and embody traditional conceptions of persons, groups, and the cosmos—they are inventions that are nevertheless outgrowths of tradition. Their presence today in settings that would otherwise be understood as belonging solely to the world of the settler state and global modernity reframes those settings, helping to maintain a distinct Maori world. I am currently at work on a book based on this material, tentatively called Houses and Hopes: Cultural Invention As Cultural Continuity
At present I am pursuing a number of projects: In the summer of 2005 I did preliminary fieldwork for a study of the recently established “Maori Television” network. This will allow me to explore further the ways in which Maori position themselves with respect to “popular culture,” both local and global. In the longer term I would like to examine the more explicitly political aspects of the “globalization of indigenousness,” both in terms of the concrete connections made between indigenous peoples in different places and in terms of the emergence of “indigenousness” as a perspective from which to criticize the contemporary world order (as among Mexican Zapatistas). While my previous published work on the U.S. has been about countercultural “resistance” involving body modification, my next project will address mainstream “middle class” life, specifically weddings, which I see as sites where Americans perform both their aspirations and their identities, and as places where the interrelation between cultural structures, specific historical moments, mass marketing, and public culture can be observed.
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Teaching Materials by Daniel Rosenblatt
This course provides an overview of ways anthropology (and related disciplines) can help us understand the world in which we live by looking at some of the important values, ideas, and practices that shape life in what we can describe as “Anglo Settler North America.” Much of what we read will be focused on the United States, mainly because that is where most of the research has been done, but also because the U.S. has played a profound role in shaping the modern world as a whole. Although this U.S.-centrism would be hard to avoid given the state of existing research, we will try to avoid some of its more pernicious effects by making it conscious rather than unconscious: thus we will to keep in mind the question of whether what we learn about the U.S. applies to Canada, to Western liberal democracies more generally, or to the modern world as a whole.
The most important theme of the course will be the centrality of success as a cultural value in North America and the closely related question of how social class works in our society. The course begins by looking at the way the question of “how to succeed” is treated in some 1980s film comedies, and we pair this with an introduction to the “cultural aspects” of social class in the U.S. We then move on to look at the impact the cultural importance of success has on the institution of high school, including the class logics underlying such familiar high school identities as “jock” and “nerd.” We conclude this first section of the course with a deeper structural analysis of social class, highlighting the importance of the middle class to contemporary society and connecting middle class consciousness to the organization of production in modern capitalism.
The next section of the course deals with the relationship between success, class, and other aspects of who we are and how we live. We look at such things as how we approach getting jobs, how we feel if we can’t get a job, the intersection of class with other aspects of our identity such as race and gender, and the way these larger social categories and values shape intimate aspects of our lives such as relationships. The complex intersections and interconnections between categories such as class, race, im/migration, gender, sexuality, language, and nationalism give us insight into what the mainstream is and how it is constructed.
The third section of the course introduces another major theme, consumption. What is the significance of the fact that we satisfy our material needs by buying objects that are imbued with all sorts of social significance? How did it come to be that the objects we buy do not merely signal status but help us create who we are and purport to solve our emotional and social problems? How do objects get meaning and how do they give meaning to people who buy them? Why do we long for certain objects? Why are we uncomfortable with such “materialism” and how do we express that discomfort?
The question of our collective discomfort with consumption provides a segue into the last main theme of the course: the persistent tendency of members of our society to resist the dominant cultural injunction to pursue success by embracing various forms of romanticism, antimodernism, and bohemianism. In looking at such forms of cultural resistance to the mainstream we will be concerned with both their connections to each other and the ways they reproduce as well as challenge the values and conceptions that characterize the mainstream.
In the final section of the course we try to put some of what we have learned to use by looking at the election of Donald Trump and the emergence of new forms of right wing politics. Does what we have learned about North American culture help us understand the appeal of such ideologies or movements?
This course provides an overview of ways anthropology (and related disciplines) can help us understand the world in which we live by looking at some of the important values, ideas, and practices that shape life in what we can describe as “Anglo Settler North America.” Much of what we read will be focused on the United States, mainly because that is where most of the research has been done, but also because the U.S. has played a profound role in shaping the modern world as a whole. Although this U.S.-centrism would be hard to avoid given the state of existing research, we will try to avoid some of its more pernicious effects by making it conscious rather than unconscious: thus we will to keep in mind the question of whether what we learn about the U.S. applies to Canada, to Western liberal democracies more generally, or to the modern world as a whole.
The most important theme of the course will be the centrality of success as a cultural value in North America and the closely related question of how social class works in our society. The course begins by looking at the way the question of “how to succeed” is treated in some 1980s film comedies, and we pair this with an introduction to the “cultural aspects” of social class in the U.S. We then move on to look at the impact the cultural importance of success has on the institution of high school, including the class logics underlying such familiar high school identities as “jock” and “nerd.” We conclude this first section of the course with a deeper structural analysis of social class, highlighting the importance of the middle class to contemporary society and connecting middle class consciousness to the organization of production in modern capitalism.
The next section of the course deals with the relationship between success, class, and other aspects of who we are and how we live. We look at such things as how we approach getting jobs, how we feel if we can’t get a job, the intersection of class with other aspects of our identity such as race and gender, and the way these larger social categories and values shape intimate aspects of our lives such as relationships. The complex intersections and interconnections between categories such as class, race, im/migration, gender, sexuality, language, and nationalism give us insight into what the mainstream is and how it is constructed.
The third section of the course introduces another major theme, consumption. What is the significance of the fact that we satisfy our material needs by buying objects that are imbued with all sorts of social significance? How did it come to be that the objects we buy do not merely signal status but help us create who we are and purport to solve our emotional and social problems? How do objects get meaning and how do they give meaning to people who buy them? Why do we long for certain objects? Why are we uncomfortable with such “materialism” and how do we express that discomfort?
The question of our collective discomfort with consumption provides a segue into the last main theme of the course: the persistent tendency of members of our society to resist the dominant cultural injunction to pursue success by embracing various forms of romanticism, antimodernism, and bohemianism. In looking at such forms of cultural resistance to the mainstream we will be concerned with both their connections to each other and the ways they reproduce as well as challenge the values and conceptions that characterize the mainstream.
In the final section of the course we try to put some of what we have learned to use by looking at the election of Donald Trump and the emergence of new forms of right wing politics. Does what we have learned about North American culture help us understand the appeal of such ideologies or movements?