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i gave her my heart but she wanted my soul
It looks like the little black dress is winning in yesterday's poll! Which is good, because that'll be easier to pack around with me anyway.
(less than a week until my first con! Well, not my first con. My first girls' con, though.)
Alas, a convention for doing![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
metafandomy stuff and I haven't even been keeping up with metafandom, because I just find hate memes *boring*. They can be mildly interesting as a way to learn old gossip, but nobody ever puts the juicy details in, so why bother?
There was a post just linked, though, that I clicked through too, because I thought somebody was finally saying what I think about hate memes. It wasn't, though, so I'll have to say it here: Hate memes are not about the little people finally getting a chance to speak up against the BNFs. Speaking as someone who is very definitely a Little Person, the little people have no fear whatsoever of speaking out, because they're perfectly confident that nobody important is listening, and that even if they were, they wouldn't care. The people who need an anonymeme to diss the important people are the other important people. This is made evident by the fact that the average Mary S. Lurker who posts a fic every few months and mostly just reads, doesn't have a clue what people are talking about in those threads, 90% of the time. There are no little people in hate memes!
Granted, I may have a much broader definition than most of what makes someone an important person. But as anybody who's done any reading to speak of at all in the early archeology of the Americas knows, the way in which inequality develops in a previously egalitarian system with a gift-based economy, like Melanesia, Pacific Coast Indians, pre-classic Maya, hobbits of the Shire or internet fandom, is that social institutions develop which allow certain people to accumulate higher status than others, usually by way of a) hard work, b) risk-taking behavior, and c) making friends and influencing people. This early stage of a hierachical society is often marked by what anhropologists call "Big Men" and fanthropologists call "BNFs", high-status leaders with great influence and/or wealth who are recognized for the great services and wisdom they offer the tribe. A BNF's power is distinguished from leadership posititions in more complex societies because it is not inherited, or otherwise appointed, but simply a recognition of a consensus of the tribe, and therefore it is an inherently unstable one. Large amounts of cultural energy go into rituals which allow the BNFs to stabilize or risk their status, most of which, like the well-known potlaches of the Pacific Northwest, end up working (at least on the surface) to the benefit of the little people, at least in terms of entertainment.
Oh, just go read the wikipedia article. The point is, in that sort of society, the only people who have anything to lose by badmouthing the big men are other big men, and those who are trying to challenge them, because the whole system is only held up by a complicated system of gift and status exchange by which the big men have to appear to be friends with nearly everyone nearly all the time. The people who aren't part of the jostling for status, or who take part in it only by supporting a faction, the ones who mostly only worry about fishing, taking advantage of the parties the BNFs give in order to maintain their status, and cuddling for warmth at night - ridiculing the people up top is one of the perks. (I'm not saying that all BNFs are like the mean girls in high school. I'm just saying - they're the only ones who have something to lose by being hateful. If *I* do something spectacularly wanky, everybody will've forgotten it in under a week.)
In other words, instead of anonymous bitching, we should just dump them all in a ball court with a couple of solid rubber bludgers and make them play indoor-rules no-fouls Quidditch for a couple days. That's the way they used to settle these festering grudges, back when BNFs were *real* BNFs. That and cattle-raids. And then we can sacrifice the survivors to Tlazoteotl and hang their heads from a tree. ...Of course, given the myths of the ball game, even that wouldn't be enough to get them to stop sniping.
*sigh* It's probably a very good thing that the anthro department at Maryland didn't impress me, or I'd be worse than Daniel already...
(Quidditch really does remind me of the Ball Game, though. Even more than Pyramid/Triad does. With the bludgers, and the vertical rings that look like giant bubble-blowers, and a way to end a game and make the rest of the play completely irrelevant. You know what? All it would take to make Quidditch make sense is to make it possible to end the game *without* catching the Snitch. Why didn't I think of that before?.. should I have put a section on Quidditch in my essay on the ball game? I can't believe I passed up a chance to cite Quidditch Through the Ages in an anthropology paper!)
Also? I know nothing about soccer, and even I could tell that the U.S. team played like crap yesterday. All would be going well, and then they'd get the stupid idea in their head that they should try to *score*, and that would be the end of that. Very sad. Also, the Czechs were not only much smarter players, they were even *cuter* than our guys. Alas.
(less than a week until my first con! Well, not my first con. My first girls' con, though.)
Alas, a convention for doing
metafandomy stuff and I haven't even been keeping up with metafandom, because I just find hate memes *boring*. They can be mildly interesting as a way to learn old gossip, but nobody ever puts the juicy details in, so why bother?There was a post just linked, though, that I clicked through too, because I thought somebody was finally saying what I think about hate memes. It wasn't, though, so I'll have to say it here: Hate memes are not about the little people finally getting a chance to speak up against the BNFs. Speaking as someone who is very definitely a Little Person, the little people have no fear whatsoever of speaking out, because they're perfectly confident that nobody important is listening, and that even if they were, they wouldn't care. The people who need an anonymeme to diss the important people are the other important people. This is made evident by the fact that the average Mary S. Lurker who posts a fic every few months and mostly just reads, doesn't have a clue what people are talking about in those threads, 90% of the time. There are no little people in hate memes!
Granted, I may have a much broader definition than most of what makes someone an important person. But as anybody who's done any reading to speak of at all in the early archeology of the Americas knows, the way in which inequality develops in a previously egalitarian system with a gift-based economy, like Melanesia, Pacific Coast Indians, pre-classic Maya, hobbits of the Shire or internet fandom, is that social institutions develop which allow certain people to accumulate higher status than others, usually by way of a) hard work, b) risk-taking behavior, and c) making friends and influencing people. This early stage of a hierachical society is often marked by what anhropologists call "Big Men" and fanthropologists call "BNFs", high-status leaders with great influence and/or wealth who are recognized for the great services and wisdom they offer the tribe. A BNF's power is distinguished from leadership posititions in more complex societies because it is not inherited, or otherwise appointed, but simply a recognition of a consensus of the tribe, and therefore it is an inherently unstable one. Large amounts of cultural energy go into rituals which allow the BNFs to stabilize or risk their status, most of which, like the well-known potlaches of the Pacific Northwest, end up working (at least on the surface) to the benefit of the little people, at least in terms of entertainment.
Oh, just go read the wikipedia article. The point is, in that sort of society, the only people who have anything to lose by badmouthing the big men are other big men, and those who are trying to challenge them, because the whole system is only held up by a complicated system of gift and status exchange by which the big men have to appear to be friends with nearly everyone nearly all the time. The people who aren't part of the jostling for status, or who take part in it only by supporting a faction, the ones who mostly only worry about fishing, taking advantage of the parties the BNFs give in order to maintain their status, and cuddling for warmth at night - ridiculing the people up top is one of the perks. (I'm not saying that all BNFs are like the mean girls in high school. I'm just saying - they're the only ones who have something to lose by being hateful. If *I* do something spectacularly wanky, everybody will've forgotten it in under a week.)
In other words, instead of anonymous bitching, we should just dump them all in a ball court with a couple of solid rubber bludgers and make them play indoor-rules no-fouls Quidditch for a couple days. That's the way they used to settle these festering grudges, back when BNFs were *real* BNFs. That and cattle-raids. And then we can sacrifice the survivors to Tlazoteotl and hang their heads from a tree. ...Of course, given the myths of the ball game, even that wouldn't be enough to get them to stop sniping.
*sigh* It's probably a very good thing that the anthro department at Maryland didn't impress me, or I'd be worse than Daniel already...
(Quidditch really does remind me of the Ball Game, though. Even more than Pyramid/Triad does. With the bludgers, and the vertical rings that look like giant bubble-blowers, and a way to end a game and make the rest of the play completely irrelevant. You know what? All it would take to make Quidditch make sense is to make it possible to end the game *without* catching the Snitch. Why didn't I think of that before?.. should I have put a section on Quidditch in my essay on the ball game? I can't believe I passed up a chance to cite Quidditch Through the Ages in an anthropology paper!)
Also? I know nothing about soccer, and even I could tell that the U.S. team played like crap yesterday. All would be going well, and then they'd get the stupid idea in their head that they should try to *score*, and that would be the end of that. Very sad. Also, the Czechs were not only much smarter players, they were even *cuter* than our guys. Alas.
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You will have a clip show coming soon. Hopefully it doesn't suck much.
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Although it doesn't quite match up because nobody owes primary allegience to anybody else, unless that was your point, that since we don't live in villages things get a lot more complicated.
Second the fandom deathmatches, like in Zoolander when they have a walk-off. Only a . . . fic-off. Unless that's what things like fandom awards are for.
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We do have primary allegences; it's just that they're organized into fandoms instead of villages! True, primary allegience has become much more fluid and multifaceted since the start of a more formally stratified society with the reorganization into livejournals, which allow a big man's status to be both more immediately visible and more self-amplifying, and in some cases to override fandom allegience. But note that the hate memes were still organized by fandom.
...I'm pretty sure you know *far* more about the anthropology here than I do.