In today’s society it is important to let everyone know what you are eating, where you are eating and with whom you are eating as instantaneously as possible. This cultish practice of social media, of posting pictures of our food – letting others experience our experiences before we even do – is commonplace. I struggled to think how I could capture activity utilizing the tactics of the anthropological, essayist, and/or autobiographical modes, never realizing the answer was with me and around me the entire time.
I work in the service industry and having been employed with the same company for over 3 years, I often notice people capturing pictures of their food before eating (I’ve done it a time or two myself when presented with a particularly photographic cheeseburger). I couldn’t help but think, how would a person in Africa – someone like N!ai – look at this behavior? Better yet, how would John Marshall, if he were removed from the Western world or from the social-media-dominated-world look at this behavior? So for five days I decided to practice what most of us practice or at least have seen others practice.
Geertz explores this phenomena called culture by explicating expressions used in common society. These expressions, or in light of his specific example, a wink, seem tiny and insignificant to most of us acting within our own cultural contexts, but to an anthropologist or ethnographer, these social gestures are a “speck of behavior,” a “fleck of culture” (6). He mentions Max Weber, a philosopher infamous for suggesting that we make our meaning; a truck would be no different from any other vehicle if we did not say so, just as love would not debated as tangible or a fleeting emotion unless we knew a difference between the two. This “semiotic approach to culture” aids an ethnographer to converse with its subject, to better understand the culture they may be studying (24).
After reading the essay, I attempted to possess myself with these ideologies of ethnography. To be an ethnographer is to observe, removed yet not removed, and to write. I do not attempt to explain why people enjoy sharing their food with Internet-friends (a category of friends most of us have, a face you can only put a name to, someone you may have worked with once, a cousin’s friend he or she brought along on a family road trip four summers ago); rather, I decide to act out this cultural practice myself, to put myself in the field where culture is acting itself out both online and in real time. Geertz wrote that culture is “public” yet it is also “self-contained,” something existing within us yet is also brought forth by our own actions and vocalizations (11-12).
My photos seek to mimic what my friends and family (and Internet-friends) do, sometimes every day, and by this I am an anthropologist. I interpret the prowess of social media culture in today’s society by exploring and explicating it, creating a vocabulary to express the “role of culture in human life” (27).
In the end, the vocabulary sounds a lot like this: Social media is all about promoting oneself. We write statuses or post pictures to gain “Likes” or tiny, red-flushed hearts; having others be a part of our day may make us feel more significant or (pardon the subtle pun) liked. So when one posts a picture of their food, whether it is half-eaten, being cooked, or freshly on their table, is it to show off the food or to show off one’s ability to navigate social media? Does food-posting serve the function of power (“Look what I can do!” “Look what I’m eating!”) or does it serve the function of acceptance (“Wish you were eating this with me?”)? As Geertz notes, with anthropology nothing is ever completely answered, but it is the posing of questions that help gain understanding of different cultures and how they work within us (or even without us) every day.