In the fall, when the proliferation of so-called fake news began to be publicly recognized, I solicited opinions on this frustrating phenomenon. Seussian stack, weaving and wobbling but somehow staying upright) has inspired generations of anthropologists to dig deeper, even while understanding that they – we – will never reach the bottom. The vivid imagery of this snippet (turtle after turtle after turtle in a Dr. And that turtle? “Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down.”
There is an Indian story – at least I heard it as an Indian story – about an Englishman who, having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, asked (perhaps he was an ethnographer it is the way they behave), what did the turtle rest on? Another turtle. Recently, my coursework turned up a classic gem which I would like to attempt to apply to a small facet of this year’s political development: “fake news.”Ĭlifford Geertz, the late titan of anthropology from Princeton, offers the following anecdote in his chapter in Contemporary Field Research: I count myself extremely fortunate to not only be able to devote my time to learning, but also to have access to literature within my own discipline (an ethnographic exploration of music), as well as historical musicology, anthropology, and sociology. I suspect I’m not the only graduate student doing this. As a PhD student in a theoretically-oriented department of ethnomusicology (a real word!), I have been searching within my coursework for a mechanism to explain the current political system.
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