2.7 I’d met Madison, as I’ve already mentioned, two months earlier, in Budapest. I’d been at a conference. She’d been there with some girlfriends. We’d got talking in the hotel bar. An anthropologist, she’d said; that’s … exotic. Not at all, I’d replied; I work for an incorporated business, in a basement. Yes, she said, but … But what? I asked. Dances, and masks, and feathers, she eventually responded: that’s the essence of your work, isn’t it? I mean, even if you’re writing a report on workplace etiquette, or how to motivate employees or whatever, you’re seeing it all through a lens of rituals, and rites, and stuff. It must make the everyday all primitive and strange — no? I saw what she was getting at; but she was wrong. For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday. In his key volume Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss, the twentieth century’s most brilliant ethnographer, describes pacing the streets, all draped with new electric cable, of Lahore’s Old Town sometime in the nineteen-fifties, trying to piece together, long after the event, a vanished purity — of local colour, texture, custom, life in general — from nothing but leftovers and debris. He goes on to describe being struck by the same impression when he lived among the Amazonian Nambikwara tribe: the sense of having come “too late”—although he knows, from having read a previous account of life among the Nambikwara, that the anthropologist (that account’s author) who came here fifty years earlier, before the rubber-traders and the telegraph, was struck by that impression also; and knows as well that the anthropologist who, inspired by the account that Lévi-Strauss will himself write of this trip, shall come back in fifty more will be struck by it too, and wish—if only! — that he could have been here fifty years ago (that is, now, or, rather, then) to see what he, Lévi-Strauss, saw, or failed to see. This leads him to identify a “double-bind” to which all anthropologists, and anthropology itself, are, by their very nature, prey: the “purity” they crave is no more than a state in which all frames of comprehension, of interpretation and analysis, are lacking; once these are brought to bear, the mystery that drew the anthropologist towards his subject in the first place vanishes. I explained this to her; and she seemed, despite the fact that she was drunk, to understand what I was saying. Wow, she murmured; that’s kind of fucked.
2.8 When I arrived at Madison’s, we had sex. Afterwards, lying in bed, I asked her what she’d been doing in Turin. I wasn’t in Turin, she answered; you were. But you were too, I said. No I wasn’t, she replied. You told me that you had been once, I said — when we Skyped, just last night. I never said I’d been in Turin, she mumbled into her pillow; she was half asleep. She was silent for a few moments, and I thought she’d drifted off. After a while, though, she continued mumbling. I said, she told me, that I’d been in Torino-Caselle. Okay, I said, Torino-Caselle: what were you doing there? Waiting, she said, just like you were. What for? I asked. A plane, she said. What else do people wait for in an airport?
3
3.1 My meeting with Peyman didn’t take place all that week. He’d been delayed in Vienna for so long that by the time a flight became available his schedule had him in Seattle, so he’d flown straight there. This was annoying — beyond annoying: frustrating. In fact, his absence filled me with what I can only describe as anxiety. Not that his presence made you feel un-anxious, calm; far from it. The whole place ran on anxiety: it was Peyman’s motor-oil, his generative fuel. But there’s anxiety and anxiety. With the Project contract won, knowing the weight he attached to it, I, like everyone else in the Company, was now anxious to see Peyman and, through Peyman, to connect: either to some rich and stellar network that we pictured lying behind this name, Koob-Sassen; or, if not that, then at least to … something. Being near Peyman made you feel connected. In his absence, I spent the week wrapping up other briefs that I’d been working on: transcribing audio files, drawing up charts, tweaking documents, drifting around websites. Mostly drifting around websites.
3.2 What does an anthropologist working for a business actually do? We purvey cultural insight. What does that mean? It means that we unpick the fibre of a culture (ours), its weft and warp — the situations it throws up, the beliefs that underpin and nourish it — and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product). Ethnographers do field research, creating photomontages out of single moments captured in a street or café; or they get sample citizens — teenagers, office workers, mums — to produce video-diaries for them, outlining their daily routines in intimate detail, confiding to the camera the desires, emotions, aspirations and so forth that visit them as they unload a dishwasher, lace up trainers, or sip foam through that little slit you get in plastic coffee-cup lids. It’s about identifying and probing granular, mechanical behaviours, extrapolating from a sample batch of these a set of blueprints, tailored according to each brief — blueprints which, taken as a whole and cross-mapped onto the findings of more “objective” or empirical studies (quantitative analysis, econometric modeling and the like), lay bare some kind of inner social logic, which can be harnessed, put to use. In essence it’s not that much different from what soothsayers, ichthyomancers, did in ancient times: those wolfskin-clad men who moved from stone-age settlement to stone-age settlement, cutting fish open to tease wisdom from their entrails. The difference being, of course, that soothsayers were frauds.
3.3 Once, for a brief time, I was famous. My renown came in the wake of my first — and only — major academic study. The study’s subject was club culture. For three years, in the nineties — my mid-to-late twenties — I spent a large portion of my waking (and sleeping) hours among clubbers. I took a barman job in Bagleys; spent off-nights at the Fridge, the Ministry of Sound, the Velvet Rooms and Turnmills; took poppers, speed, MDMA; the lot. By the end I was helping procure venues for illicit raves, helping direct crowds to these through coded messages put out on pirate radio stations, cellular networks and the array of whisper-lines that spring up around this type of dubious activity. I then spent two more years writing it all up. On my study’s publication (first as a doctoral thesis, then, two years later, with me in my mid-thirties, as an actual book that real people could buy), what was generally found to be most notable about it wasn’t the insight it afforded into the demimonde or “mindset” or whatever you want to call it of clubbers, but rather the book’s frequent and expansive “asides” in which I meditated on contemporary ethnographic method and its various quandaries.