by Justin E. H. Smith
Going through a difficult separation? Feeling lonely? Well I've got just the book for you. It's called After Kinship, and it's by Janet Carsten. She says that the focus on the affine pair as the basic unit of anthropological theory was really only a projection of mid-twentieth-century Euro-American ideology into an ethnographic field where bonds of kinship are by and large much more fluid than Lévy-Bruhl et al. were able to understand. I don't know why they keep this kind of stuff away from the 'self help' section of the bookstore. It cheers me right up.
I went to the Lawrenceville Petco and inquired about getting a cat to keep me company. “I'd really like a cat,” I said to the teen-aged employee, “but I'm worried about hygiene.”
“Cats are only as filthy as their owners,” she said, rehearsing some bit of wisdom she did not seem fully to comprehend.
“Well, suppose I'm filthy,” I replied.
“Oh. Maybe you should get, like, a hermit crab?”
I received a message from a former student. “Hey,” it started out, “I heard you're retired now. That's too bad! You were a great teacher!” For the record, I'm 38, and I'm on a temporary research sabbatical. And I am not a 'teacher'.
Facebook now has sidebar ads that are supposed to speak to the particular interests and desires of the social-networking site's individual users. Recently I've been getting an ad that beckons: “Hey Philosopher! Find your market!”
Now this is why I can't have a cat: Just today I discovered an uneaten basket of raspberries, purchased in January, at the bottom of my desk drawer. It was sitting on top of the copy of Being and Time that I've been carrying around with me for complicated reasons I need not go into here. Little remained of the raspberries, as they had been gradually replaced by thousands upon thousands of fruit flies. If I had a cat, I would have joked to her: Well look at that, countless generations of them have come and gone since January, and they still haven't outgrown their Heidegger phase.