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Hello! We are a group of American University students dedicated to the revival of the Mass Observation movement begun in Britain. We look for the minutiae of daily life in America that tell us something about the performance of race. We do nothing but observe. There are no opinions, analyses, or answers, just observations -- that's what mass observation is.
This blog is part of a larger project of our anthropology class. While others pay particular attention to public communication, sex and sexuality, and body language, our focus here is the performance of race. We look at the many ways in which people or things become of an ethnic background. This can include how a person references, whether through physical attributes, speech patterns, or surroundings, another ethnicity. It can include the ways in which a person makes their own ethnicity apparent (or render them invisible). Even within one ethnic diaspora, we meticulously capture the events in which they separate themselves through even narrower ethnic classifications. Every entry displays a reenactment of a racialized characteristic in the context of American life -- and a profound sense of the meaning of culture.
We participate in the mass observation movement because we believe that it has much to contribute to the field of anthropology. We capture the "thick description" described by Geertz without the consequences of our participation. In each moment, we are able to catch power structures, cultural flows, functions, structures, an individual's or community's relationship to its environment, human agency, symbols and symbolic meaning, the difference differences make, and/or how history is played out in one simple incident.
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