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Eschew the monumental

Shun the Epic. All the guys who can paint great big pictures can paint great small one

ernest hemingway

how to answer the question about your nationality without feeling awkward about it

In this post, we are answering your long lingering question, quest for finding a way to express your disbelief in defining yourself through your nationality. although it might play a tiny part in conservations, even as a box to be filled in an application for a trivilous card, you might still feel a bit of out of space, uneasy when asked about your national identity. You might want to start telling, how complicated it is to just nail it down with a word. You might want to raise the shattering of identities, or tell how sick and constructed it is. Or say, or ask the person how often does s/he really thinks about her/his national identity? And even it seems like a very simple-straightforward question, what it actually refers to, in everyday conversation is, where you are from, under which lights, weather conditions you grown up, where your accent come from, to locate you, although they might not have a particular idea about that part of the world. What they know would be generic, even streotypical. but yet, an idea about what kind person you might be, a touchy mediterranean, a whining middle easterner, a loud north american, laid back latin american?
anyway, all those things aside, you face a very simple question on the surface of it. But then it is not that simple for you. You would like to talk about, how you think the founder of the turkish identity actually formulated a performative national identity, by saying anyone that says I am turkish is turkish.
but you cannot do that, at least not to everyone.
so I was thinking a way of telling it, just answering the question with a word, but twisting it. Try stressing the -ish at the end, which gives the meaning of approximity to the word. which will eliminate the preciseness, the contained nature, circumscribed borders of national identity. and dont forget to wave your hands, on a horizontal axis, to underpin your emphasis on the approximate.

land·mark: studio practice as a series of landmark to track down the change

 [ˈlændˌmɑrk]

noun

1.

a prominent or conspicuous object on land that serves as a guide, especially to ships at sea or to travelers on a road; a distinguishing landscape feature marking a site or location: The post office served as a landmark for locating the street to turn down.

2.

something used to mark the boundary of land.

3.

a building or other place that is of outstanding historical, aesthetic, or cultural importance, often declared as such and given a special status (landmark designation),  ordaining its preservation, by some authorizing organization.

4.

a significant or historic event, juncture, achievement, etc.: The court decision stands as a landmark in constitutional law.

verb (used with object)

5.

to declare (a building, site, etc.) a landmark: a movement to landmark New York's older theaters.

to sync

with the other

"avoid any kind of craft...therefore any kind of style"

says david shrigley.
"starts with a text then becomes an image than becomes text
describing what does not need to described"
translating what does not need to be translated

body techniques-habilis-craft: readings for embodied knowledge

Body techniques

Mauss describes 'techniques of the body' as highly developed body actions that embody aspects of a given culture. Techniques may also be divided by such as gender and class (for example in the manner of walking or eating).

These include such as eating, washing, sitting, swimming, running, climbing, swimming, child-rearing, and so on.

The techniques are adapted to situations, such as aboriginal squatting where no seats are available. Techniques are thus a 'craft' (Latin: habilis) that is learned.
Hence I have had this notion of the social nature of the 'habitus' for
many years. Please note that I use the Latin word-it should be understood
in France-habitus. The word translates infinitely better than
'habitude' (habit or custom), the 'exis', the 'acquired ability' and 'faculty'
of Aristotle (who was a psychologist). It does not designate those
metaphysical habitudes, that mysterious 'memory', the subjects of
volumes or short and famous theses. These 'habits' do not just vary
with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between
societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges. In them we
should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical
reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its
repetitive faculties.
(Mauss, 1973, p.73).

The teaching of these methods is what embeds the methods and the teaching is embedded within cultures and schools of teaching. A pupil who becomes a teacher will likely teach what they are taught.

Norbert Elias and Pierre Bourdieu developed the ideas further in habitus, the non-discursive aspects of culture that bind people into groups, including unspoken habits and patterns of behavior as well as styles and skill in body techniques.


Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Elias, N. (1978). The History of Manners. The Civilizing Process: Volume I. New York: Pantheon Books
Elias, N. (1982). Power and Civility. The Civilizing Process: Volume II. New York: Pantheon Books
Mauss, Marcel. 1934. Les Techniques du corps, Journal de Psychologie 32(3-4). Reprinted in Mauss, Sociologie et anthropologie, 1936, Paris: PUF


Fieldnotes may be no more than a trigger for bodily and a hitherto subconscious memories. We cannot write down the knowledge at the time of experiencing it, although we may retrospectively write of it in autobiographical modes. The specific ways in which we learned awaits recounting (Okely 1978). Bourdieu notes how the body can be treated “ as a memory” (1977: 94), it cannot always be consciously controlled. Anthropologists acquire a different bodily memory in fieldwork experience as an adult in another culture. The commonplace analogy between the anthropologist and a child learning another culture is misleading since the anthropologist is already formed and shaped by history. He or she has no change or superimpose new experience upon past embodied knowledge (Mauss 1938), and come to terms with a changing self embodied in new contexts.

Okeley, J. (1992). Anthropology and autobiography: Participatory experience and embodied knowledge.Routledge. London and NY, p. 16