Copy Generic - How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds

"An illuminating look at how the "generic" is key to how we make meaning in the world. From off-brand products to elevator music, the "generic" is discarded as the copy, the knock-off, and the old. In The Copy Generic, anthropologist Scott MacLochlainn insists that more than the waste from the culture machine, the generic is a universal social tool, allowing us to move through the world with necessary frames of reference. It is the baseline and background, a category that includes and orders different types of specificity yet remains non-specific in itself. Across arenas as diverse as city planning, social media, ethnonationalism, and religion, the generic points to spaces in which knowledge is both over-produced and desperately lacking. Moving through ethnographic and historical settings in the Philippines, Europe, and the United States, MacLochlainn reveals ways the "generic" is crucial to how things repeat, circulate, and are classified in the world"--

About the author

Scott MacLochlainn is assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Product details

• Authors: Scott Maclochlainn
• Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.11.2022
• EAN: 9780226822778
• ISBN: 978-0-226-82277-8
• No. of pages: 232
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Pre and early history; Non-fiction book > History > Pre and early history, antiquity; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > Sociological theories; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology of Religion, Anthropology, RELIGION / Christianity / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, Archaeology