This paper brings together two brilliant analysts of social encounters, Jane Austen and Erving Goffman. It proceeds by applying some of Goffman's terms for face‐to‐face interactions to several scenes from Austen's novels in which characters try to extract information from others while preventing others from extracting information from them. In their treatment of these “expression games,” both authors display a similar sociological sensibility. They differ, however, in their treatment of the individual in relation to society; for Austen, an individual can never be viewed apart from family and connections, while for Goffman, the individual is in and of itself a sacred social entity.

Postage stamps are sites of nationalist imagery, produced continuously by the US government since 1847. Over time, a limited group of people deemed worthy of representing the nation on stamps-white male politicians and military heroes-was diversified to include different kinds of persons: women, Native Americans, African Americans, and people in the arts, sciences, athletics, and entertainment. This paper focuses on a singular exception to this iconographic diversification: workers, people who labor. Stamps that seem to be about labor (those devoted to such topics as labor leaders, collective bargaining, and employment for the disabled) are, we claim, about something other than "labor as such." Drawing on Marx's Grundrisse, we argue that in capitalist societies, waged labor and pauperism are indissolubly linked because laborers have no control over the reliability of their employment. Laborers are "humanity ground zero," people deemed (in capitalist common sense) to have accomplished nothing beyond working for a wage and who therefore cannot be represented in postal iconography as builders of the nation.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Magnificent Boat: The Colonial Theft of a South Seas Cultural Treasure. Götz Aly. Jefferson Chase, trans. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023, 207 pp. $29.95, cloth. ISBN 9780674276574.Richard HandlerRichard HandlerUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 79, Number 4Winter 2023Decolonization and the History of Americanist Anthropology Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727101 Views: 3Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected].PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Examining the canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American stamps, Laura Goldblatt and Richard Handler show how postal iconography and material culture offer a window into the contested meanings and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship.

In this Photoarticle, we survey what we will call the post-historical U.S. postage stamps of the last third of the twentieth century. We focus on stamps depicting the space race and space travel, as well as the linkage of some of those stamps to the 1992 Olympic games, to analyze the iconographic and narrative consequences of an increasing turn toward the commercialization of postal services. The stamps we consider coincide with a series of new commercial strategies on the part of the United States Postal Service (USPS) and a broad resurgence in public interest in space travel. While many critics during the 1960s considered the space race to be a distraction from more pressing political concerns—such as urban poverty or the war in Vietnam—by the 1980s and 1990s, space travel had become a less controversial endeavor (perhaps due to its large-scale defunding), and astronauts, especially the Apollo 11 astronauts, were widely lauded as heroes. We have chosen this “topical” focus (as stamp collectors say) for two reasons. First, the iconography of space exploration is dominated by one specific moment, when the lunar module Eagle touched down on the moon on July 20, 1969. Despite an ongoing history of space exploration before and after 1969, the moon landing, we will argue, was treated in postal iconography as a timeless event —a climactic technological triumph that seemed to announce what Francis Fukuyama, in an influential essay, called “the end of history.”

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America can be read as an extended anthropological comparison of hierarchical and egalitarian societies ('aristocracies' and 'democracies,' in his terms). In its use of comparative method, it is strikingly modern, almost post-modern: secular social science. And yet, for Tocqueville, divine knowledge provided another comparative perspective. In this essay, I explore the implications of Tocqueville's consideration of divine order for his work as a seemingly secular comparative anthropologist. I argue that one of the foundational concepts of secular social science, 'society,' may not be universally applicable since, as Tocqueville's work suggests, it is ill-suited for the study of people who thought of their world as a divine, not a social, order.

Summary New Orleans has long provided visitors with scenes for the pursuit of what Erving Goffman called “action”—out‐of‐the‐ordinary experiences through which authenticity can be achieved. The founders of the Loose Marbles band came to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to make music at the scene where jazz was born. Their activities created a new scene on Royal Street in New Orleans. With growing success, the Marbles became absorbed into the local musical establishment, but their very success required them to quit the street scene, which subsequently subsided. The essay charts the tension between the apparently spontaneous creation of a “scene” defined by what participants consider authentic action and the inevitable routinization of such scenes in tourist economies.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsAn Anthropology of the Enlightenment: Moral Social Relations Then and Today. Nigel Rapport and Huon Wardle, eds. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018, 192 pp. $114.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-3500-8660-9.Richard HandlerRichard HandlerUniversity of Virginia Search for more articles by this author University of VirginiaPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Anthropological Research Volume 76, Number 1Spring 2020Special Issue on Omissions and Silences in Ethnographic Fieldwork Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/706969 Views: 48Total views on this site © 2020 by The University of New Mexico. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.