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The Geek Anthropologist

The Geek Anthropologist

An anthropological approach to all things geek

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Highlights><
  • Shadows of the Past: Rings of Power’s Complicated Penumbra

    Shadows of the Past: Rings of Power’s Complicated Penumbra

    Rings of Power fails to lean into the possibility of moral ambiguity, instead reproducing the same simplistic binaries between good and evil. For the Elves, the inherent “goodness” of their race, and their purpose on Middle Earth is eminently visible, communicated through the sheer beauty of their people, their clothes, their architecture, their relationship to nature. Even more disturbingly, Rings of Power also reinforces cultural narratives that equate deformity with evil through the character of Adar, a “corrupted” Elf or Uruk.

  • Multiverse of Madness and the Problem of Mother as Monster

    Multiverse of Madness and the Problem of Mother as Monster

    Wanda tells us, again and again, “I’m not a monster, I’m a mother.” While recent endeavors into feminist horror have worked to critique this trope of mother monster, Wanda’s representation in Multiverse of Madness only serves to replicate this archetype—that there are good mothers and there are bad mothers, that women’s entire sense of identity and moral rectitude comes from their relationship to and orientation around reproduction and motherhood, and that one of the greatest threats to society, and indeed the multiverse, is an unhinged mother.

  • Burdened with Glorious Purpose: Loki and the Hidden, Occult Power of Bureaucracy

    Burdened with Glorious Purpose: Loki and the Hidden, Occult Power of Bureaucracy

    Loki is a story about the hidden power of bureaucracy, bureaucracy’s capacity to conjure new realities through its administrative processes and even rewrite the flow of time through its minute, arcane, and often inaccessible managerial processes.

  • Whedon, Fandom, and Cancel Culture

    Whedon, Fandom, and Cancel Culture

    By Alissa Whitmore “A guy who goes around saying ‘I’m a feminist’ usually has an agenda that is not feminist….

  • Call for Anthropological Speculative Fiction

    Call for Anthropological Speculative Fiction

    “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be…

  • Grief and Getting Beyond the Endgame

    Grief and Getting Beyond the Endgame

    The lasting impact of Avengers: Endgame on our understandings of heroism, masculinity, and mental health.  By Emma Louise Backe

  • Moon Monogamy 1 – Qualifications: One, Two, Three, Twelve, Thirteen, and Twenty-Seven

    Moon Monogamy 1 – Qualifications: One, Two, Three, Twelve, Thirteen, and Twenty-Seven

    Everyone thought the first generation would be a bunch of STEM-worshipping squares…

Latest Headlines
  • We Make the Gods We Want to Have

    We Make the Gods We Want to Have

  • Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games
  • Book Review: The Truths of Monsters
  • Introducing a New TGA Editor: Connor Martini
  • Spider-Man: No Way Home and the Problems of Magic Bullet Heroism
TGA Top 5
  • So You Want to “Do” Digital Ethnography
    So You Want to “Do” Digital Ethnography
  • Contemporary Folklore in the Digital Age
    Contemporary Folklore in the Digital Age
  • The Devil in Disguise: Modern Monsters and their Metaphors
    The Devil in Disguise: Modern Monsters and their Metaphors
  • Anthropology & Literature
    Anthropology & Literature
  • Spider-Man: No Way Home and the Problems of Magic Bullet Heroism
    Spider-Man: No Way Home and the Problems of Magic Bullet Heroism
Latest Headlines
Shadows of the Past: Rings of Power’s Complicated Penumbra

Shadows of the Past: Rings of Power’s Complicated Penumbra

Rings of Power fails to lean into the possibility of moral ambiguity, instead reproducing the same simplistic binaries between good and evil. For the Elves, the inherent “goodness” of their race, and their purpose on Middle Earth is eminently visible, communicated through the sheer beauty of their people, their clothes, their architecture, their relationship to nature. Even more disturbingly, Rings of Power also reinforces cultural narratives that equate deformity with evil through the character of Adar, a “corrupted” Elf or Uruk.

We Make the Gods We Want to Have

We Make the Gods We Want to Have

What does it mean for a telescope to be showing us the past 13 billion years? What are we looking for out there?

Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games

Book Review: Played Out – Difference and Repetition in Classic Board Games

By Samuel Gerald Collins Patkin, Terri Toles (2021). Who’s in the Game? Identity and Intersectionality in Classic Board Games. Jefferson, North Carolina:…

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Videos

  • In which I talk about Gary Con, 330 Center Street, and explain a folktale to Rhialto the Marvelous.

    Ethan Gilsdorf’s piece on Center Street: http://boingboing.net/2014/07/18/a-visit-to-the-basement-where.html

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    The Shrine of the Cobbler – Spot Check 27

  • Just a brief introduction here: this is a lecture given by Jared Miracle on the cultural history behind Pokemon. Tomorrow we’ll be posting a piece by Jared expanding on this material, but this video gives a great overview of his research in this area. /NM

    Jared Miracle holds a doctorate in anthropology from Texas A&M University, where his research has focused on transnationalism and folklore between East Asia and the West, especially where violence and the fighting arts are concerned. His professional interests include popular culture, martial arts, East Asia, archives, narrative, masculinity, violence, the supernatural, human exploration of space, and foodways. In addition to anthropology and folk studies, he has experience working in archives and document curation, is fluent in Japanese, can read Mandarin, and is a popular guest speaker on topics involving the martial arts and Japanese popular culture. He is currently seeking a publisher for a manuscript exploring the history and social role of Japanese martial arts in the United States. Jared is also at work on a book about Pokémon from a social scientific perspective. He is available for guest talks and happy to travel or tele-lecture.

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    Deep Multiplayer: Pokemon’s 2000-Year History and Social Impact

  • by NICK MIZER

    How does the overall environment of gaming influence our experience of imaginary worlds? In this Spot Check I think about my experiences gaming in Denton, TX, and how the colors, music, and words combined with the performance of the Dungeon Master to shape the imaginative experience. Anthropologically, you could talk about the holistic approach, but I also really like thinking about it as “terroir,” a term that usually applies to wine but that Jeff Vandermeer explores in an expanded sense in his novel Control (which will probably be the subject of my next weekly geek-out.

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    Color or Song or Choice Diction – Spot Check 25

  • by NICK MIZER

    In which I pronounce Jason Azze’s name correctly, worry about “first contact” with old school gamers, and describe my first encounter with Gary Con, which has become an important site for my fieldwork.

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    The Journey to Lake Geneva – Spot Check 24

  • by NICK MIZER

    Spot Check returns!

    In this episode I talk about the role of conventions in gaming culture, the role of play in gamers’ lives (and deaths), and how Gary Con fits in to that.

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    The Life Well Played – Spot Check 23

  • by NICK MIZER

    In this episode of Spot Check I talk about how the Old School Renaissance in tabletop gaming has helped to reconstruct older assumptions about gaming, and how those assumptions change our experiences of play and expand our ideas about narrative.

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    Blues Riffs and Session Pacing: Spot Check 22

  • by NICK MIZER

    I’ll be back with more on the Geek Scholars series next week, but this week it’s Spot Check!

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    Your Bedroom and The Grand Canyon: Spot Check 21

  • by NICK MIZER

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    Me PC, You NPC: Spot Check 20

  • by NICK MIZER

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    Binding the Boundless – Spot Check 19

  • by NICK MIZER 

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    Spot Check 17: Strategies of the Quantum Ogre

  • This week, we are introducing a third paper from the Geek Anthropology session which was part of the 2013 AAA annual meeting program.  You may also view the first and the second videos.

    Once again, feel free to comment and share!

    This week’s paper is by The Geek Anthropologist’s own Nicholas Mizer, a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Texas A&M University.

    Abstract: drawing on de Certeau’s (1984) portrayal of consumers as nomadic tacticians operating without a circumscribed space to call their own, this paper considers geek culture as a tactical tradition of space-making that goes back to the end of the 19th century.  Largely because of the internet-assisted development of “public spheres of the imagination,” (Saler 2012), this tradition has been immensely successful in the past twenty to thirty years, to the extent that Saler (2012:3) claims “we are all geeks now,” and  Tocci (2009:137) has to caution readers of his ethnography on geek culture that “all the proclamations we commonly see of how we have seen ‘the revenge of the nerds’…may distract us from the fact that these terms are introduced into our vocabulary as insults.”  Based on these insights, I make sense of geek’s online reflections about the state of geek culture by considering them as symptomatic of disorientation felt by geeks experiencing the new power dynamics of a post-revenge geekdom.  These power dynamics, along with the massive success of the tactics that have produced them, demonstrate that de Certeau’s presentation of tactics and strategies downplays the potential for consumer-tacticians to make lasting changes on the cultural spaces in which they operate.  It also suggests that although historically, the central metaphor for Internet culture has been that of the frontier, contemporary geek denizens of the internet are better described as nomads than as pioneers.

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    AAA Paper: When Tactics Become Strategies

  • by NICK MIZER 

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    Spot Check 16: Gaming and Intimacy

  • This week, we are introducing a second paper from the Geek Anthropology session which was part of the 2013 AAA annual meeting program.  To view the first video, click here.

    This week’s paper is From Geek to Chic: A Case Study in Identity and Consumerism, by Jennifer Boyd, a graduate of the West Chester University of Pennsylvania Anthropology Bachelor of Arts degree.

    Once again, feel free to comment and share!

    Abstract: What is geek?  More often than not the word conjures up images of overweight, white, older men dwelling in their parent’s basement with their pale faces bathed in the soft glow of a computer monitor.  It is an outdated stereotypical version of members in this particular subculture of society. In the past, geeks were limited to interactions with other geeks through interpersonal relationships within their own community.  With the impact of globalization spreading access to various fandoms and through the advancement of technology connecting geeks not just in a room but across great distances, geeks have been experiencing a fully blown renaissance of their subculture across mainstream media and invading pop culture.

    The popularity of geeks in mainstream media has given rise to the golden age of “geekdom”.   This popularity has also limited what it means to be geek and changed it to fit the norms of what society deems acceptable.  The concept of geek chic embraces geek but only if it conforms to fit with the rest of pop culture.  At the same time geek is limited by some, it is encouraged to explode in an effort to exploit merchandising opportunities.  How is this viewed by geeks across the spectrum?  In this paper, I explore the exploitation of geeks through material goods and the use of societal norms to restrain the subculture while giving it a broader audience to society.  If the growth of geek popularity continues, we may all consider ourselves geeks in the future.

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    AAA Paper: From Geek to Chic: A Case Study in Identity and Consumerism

  • by NICK MIZER

    Nazis, HP Lovecraft, and the dangers of storytelling.  Also starring my hat.

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    Spot Check Flashback #2: Gaming the Narrative Process

  • by NICK MIZER 

    How does bringing new players into a group of gamers influence their group identity? How does the complexity of a game shape a new player’s experience? Find out in this installment of Spot Check! Read More

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    Spot Check 15: Rules Complexity and Intimidation

  • by NICK MIZER 

    In this installment of Spot Check Flashbacks we’re going back to the beginning. This is the first episode of the series, recorded when my Kickstarter was in full swing. If you want to skip past the section about the Kickstarter, set a course for 1:50, where you’ll here me talk about the ways that we narrativize our everyday lives and how stories help us with that.

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    Spot Check Flashback #1: The Mythic Everyday

  • by NICK MIZER

    As promised, here is the most recent episode of Spot Check, the video series documenting my dissertation research into tabletop gaming. New episodes will be posted every Thursday. If you’d like to start at the beginning, you can go directly to the Youtube channel, or catch the archived episodes as they go up every Saturday. In this episode I talk about insider anthropology and gamers’ enthusiasm for bringing new people into the hobby.

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    Spot Check 14: Gamer Evangelism

  • This week, we are introducing a first paper from the Geek Anthropology session Nick Mizer and myself put together for the 2013 American Anthropological Association annual meeting which took place in Chicago last November. You may remember Nick Mizer’s Connecting The Dots Towards A Geek Anthropology, introduction to this session, which he presented on TGA last March.

    As promised to our readers, we will be sharing some of the papers in video form on our blog. Sadly, the recording of the last two papers was cut short, but we will be sharing those (mine and another presenter’s) in written form.

    Today’s paper is Fan Fiction, Fan Autoethnography, and Everyday Life by Charlotte Fillmore-Handlon, a PhD Student at Concordia University, Montreal.

    Abstract: Following Ben Highmore’s quest for a socio-aesthetic approach to everyday life, in this presentation I understand fan fiction as textual expressions of the everyday lives of fans who draw on familiar characters and stories of popular culture to work through the emotions and frustrations of everyday life, and I argue that we should look at fan fiction as a socio-aesthetic approach to the everyday. In contrast to more narrow definitions, I define fan fiction more broadly to include stories written both in and outside of fandom communities. In order to illustrate my argument, I will employ an autoethnographic approach, recalling my own experiences writing fan fiction as a young pre-teen. In light of the recent trend of positioning oneselves as an aca/fan (Academic/Fan) in fandom studies, I differentiate between fan fiction and fan autoethnography, drawing on Lucy Suchman’s Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. This understanding of fan fiction as a socio-aesthetic approach to the everyday will be of relevance to both fandom scholars and scholars of everyday life, as it represents a new and exciting direction of research for both fields.

    Enjoy, and feel free to leave some thoughts in the comments!

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    AAA Paper: Fan Fiction, Fan Autoethnography, and Everyday Life

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The Shrine of the Cobbler – Spot Check 27 Deep Multiplayer: Pokemon’s 2000-Year History and Social Impact Color or Song or Choice Diction – Spot Check 25 The Journey to Lake Geneva – Spot Check 24 The Life Well Played – Spot Check 23 Blues Riffs and Session Pacing: Spot Check 22 Your Bedroom and The Grand Canyon: Spot Check 21 Me PC, You NPC: Spot Check 20 Binding the Boundless – Spot Check 19 Spot Check 17: Strategies of the Quantum Ogre AAA Paper: When Tactics Become Strategies Spot Check 16: Gaming and Intimacy AAA Paper: From Geek to Chic: A Case Study in Identity and Consumerism Spot Check Flashback #2: Gaming the Narrative Process Spot Check 15: Rules Complexity and Intimidation Spot Check Flashback #1: The Mythic Everyday Spot Check 14: Gamer Evangelism AAA Paper: Fan Fiction, Fan Autoethnography, and Everyday Life
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