A Brief Look at Cicilie among the Parisians
September 16, 2010Posted by Anthropology Times under Cultural Anthropology | Permalink |
I’m still in the process of deciding how I want to blog. I continue to read anthropology blogs and other materials.
Last night I came across this blog: Cicilie among the Parisians, “a blog from Cicilie Fagerlid’s fieldwork research on poetry, anger and cosmopolitanism in Paris.” Cicilie is a Scandinavian woman living in Paris and blogging in English. Most of my person-to-person accounts of life in Paris have come from Americans. I look forward to seeing Paris from a different cultural perspective. From a post titled “A Day in Commemoration of Slavery“, Fagerlid writes the following:
In his speech, President Chirac proclaimed that “the greatness of a country is to take on all its history, the glorious pages as well as the dark parts. Our history is that of a great nation. Look at her with pride. And look at her as she is. That’s the way a people can unite and become more close(-knit).”
(As a foreigner, I do find interesting this constant return to the greatness of the French nation, and I can’t forget another of Chirac’s speeches lately on the issue of nuclear weapons, but be that as it may)
As an American this type of nationalist expression seems very familiar. I’m not sure this would have stood out to me. There are many instances of this type of difference in perspective. From what I’ve seen, Fagerlid writes on politics, literature, city life, diversity, motherhood. She shares pictures and video — something I’d like to do. I look forward to reading more of this blog and others like it.
9:41 pm, 13 December 2010
[…] Comparing the discussions of what anthropologists study when they study “at home,” I again was left with the sense that Scandinavians are less nationalistic than other Europeans and Americans. When Gullestad discussed community studies versus national studies, I was left with a sense that community studies or other types of studying-part(s)-to-understand-the-whole studies had a wider margin of preference in Scandinavian culture studies than in American ones. I first got a glimpse of this reduced nationalism when reading the blog of Norwegian anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid living in France and noting how proclamations of French nationalism stood out to her. […]