How could you not love Lucha Libre?

 

How could you not love lucha libre after reading Heather Levi’s ethnography, The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, revelations, and mexican national identity??  I’m hooked and I’m only half way through the book (I’m laying the blame at NamBloPoMo’s door for writing about books two days in a row).

 

 

 

Besides having the coolest cover I’ve ever seen on an ethnography, the book is riveting – I never thought I would be so fascinated by wrestling and men in tights, but I guess that’s the magic of a well done ethnography.  So far this one has been an excellent mix of fieldwork revelations and explanations combined with theory on cultural performance, mexican politics and a crazy mix of class, morality and gender play.  Seriously, I find myself pausing after every chapter and muttering to myself in surprise, ‘Damn, that was great’.

In an interview with the LA Times, Levi explains some of the poetic contradictions and political power that are embedded in lucha libre:

“It did several things at once,” says Levi, who trained as a wrestler in Mexico while researching her book “The World of Lucha Libre: Secrets, Revelations, and Mexican National Identity.” “It figured both as a display of these larger-than-life heroes but heroes that everybody . . . knew came from their social class or quite possibly [were] their neighbors.”

It even parodied the political system, because it was an unspoken secret that the results of lucha matches were decided in a smoke-filled room long before they began — just as many Mexicans suspected the outcome of most elections was predetermined.

Fittingly, the most popular and successful luchadores have come to represent political causes; some crusaded for animal and gay rights or for women’s equality and the environment.

The most powerful of these, the red-and-gold-masked Superbarrio, rose from the rubble of a deadly earthquake to advocate for the homeless and working poor — with surprising results.

“When Superbarrio addressed politicians, politicians who were very good at this very slick self-presentation, they would start to stammer,” Levi says. “They wouldn’t know where to look or how to look at [him]. And so the power dynamic shifted.

“There was no way to co-opt him because he didn’t exist. He was incorruptible because he both existed but at the same time didn’t exist.”

American Ethnography Quasimonthly has a quality lucha libre/wrestling issue, which is how I initially discovered Levi’s book.  The AEQ spread features an excerpt from Levi’s book, which is what convinced me to buy it, as well as some incredible old photos of lucha libre wrestlers and a magazine pictorial of a phenomenon known as apartment wrestling – the whole issue is well worth a look.

Stay tuned for a real review, sans the words ‘cool’ and ‘damn’, when I finish the book.

Photo in the post from ProAeroPhoto’s flickr stream

Imponderabilia

New international student anthropology journal.

Imponderabilia is about dialogue, exchange and interaction. Read the articles and think about them, but don’t stop there. Respond with comments and reflections. Propose counterarguments and criticisms. And contribute to the next issue.

Take a peek at Imponderabilia

Via.

More on public databases- enter ReframeIt

Using delicious as a public database only takes transparency so far.  That tiny little box for note taking isn’t enough space and it can’t direct me back to the exact line of the blogpost that I was interested in.  Despite all of delicious’ benefits for  research, its notetaking capabilities have let me down. Here’s where ReframeIt comes in.

If I want my participants to be able to see where my thinking is taking me, I need something that is more directly related to the texts they have written.   ReframeIt appears as a sidebar and allows multiple people to annotate the same text.  You can highlight the piece of text that you are referring to and make specific comments, or you can make more general comments relating to the page as a whole. And it comes with a simple firefox extension you can get here if you want to give it a try.  It’s not nearly as popular as delicious, so in some ways its usefullness will be limited. On the other hand, maybe it will take off soon.  After all, The Institute for the Future of the Book is using it in their Golden Notebook Project.  And I’ve done a quick test-run here (you have to have a reframeit account to see the comments).

The idea is that as I rebuild my delicious database, stocking it with posts from sustainability bloggers, these bloggers will have a more direct way to see the direction my work is taking and how my thoughts on their writing are unfolding.  Now I just need to get them on ReframeIt.

Starting from zero

Welcome to the blog introduction. I don’t know the best way to bring a blog into being, so I’m going to start very generally. This blog is my entry point into fieldwork. I’m an anthropologist with training wheels. My PhD project is an ethnography of blogging, specifically blogging about environmental sustainability. The blogosphere is my fieldsite and it is where I will do my participant observation. If you are an anthropologist, then you know what I mean and will probably be feeling my pain/anxiety at this point. The cliche really is true; starting fieldwork is frightening, even if the entry point is a familiar platform.

The other crucial aspect of the blog revolves around the online culture of the group of people I want to study. If you are a blogger on sustainability and you are reading this, then I want to learn more about the way you do the things you do, as the Temptations would have phrased it. I want to blog about your blog while I am communicating with you and learning from you. That seems to be the blogging way.

So the heart of this project will be the blogging– my own and that of the participants. It is through blogging that the research aims of this project will be met. The first aim is methodological and is focussed on the issues involved in conducting an ethnography completely inside the blogosphere. The second revolves around the group of bloggers who focus on environmental sustainability. For now I am approaching this with a range of questions, but they all centre around the way ideas of sustainability are performed through the process of blogging. For instance, in what ways are bloggers actors and how do they construct narratives that resonate with the people reading their blogs? Also, what makes their blog successful to them, and what makes blogging fulfilling?

Maybe it seems like this blog is speaking to two different audiences: anthropologists on one hand, and bloggers on the other. Never fear–I expect (perhaps falsely?) that most of the anthropologists who read this will themselves be bloggers. Hurray for common ground. Perhaps this site will enable a dialogue about philosophies of blogging between the two groups.

Anyway, I’m diving in and I will be posting more specific information about my research project soon. I’ll even put the whole proposal up once the research committee approves it.

And lastly, but most importantly, an invitation. I would love comments and feedback. I will also need some participants. So if you are a blogger on sustainability or an anthropologist interested in blogs as a research tool or blogging in general, please give me a holler.

marytheberge@gmail.com