Kathleen Stewart
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 2001-2002
The Private Life of Public Culture
In The Private Life of Public Culture, cultural anthropologist
Katie Stewart tracks the way that neoliberalism and advanced consumer capitalism
in the United States find multi-faceted articulation, emerging in intimate
and individual practices at the same time that they erupt in highly-generative
and collectively-experienced events. Stewart is focusing particularly on "the
charged border between things public and private" as a dynamic zone
rich with indicators of how and through what forms cultural forces and
sensibilities circulate.
Based on field work in Las Vegas, Nevada; Orange County,
California; Austin, Texas; and New England, Stewart's work combines ethnographic
analysis with cultural poesis, studying new cultural forms and forces at the
point of their affective and material emergence. By examining contemporary everyday
sensibilities and practices—such as shopping habits, "technophilia," the
proliferation of gated communities, and confessional TV talk shows—Stewart
finds linkages to broad cultural flows such as world trade, transnationalism,
and millennial capitalism.
"How do these cultural forces and flows impact
the self and, ironically, motivate a personal search for the 'true self,' the
good life, an authenticity held as individual and unsullied by public things?" Stewart
asks. "Conversely, how do things erupt from private life or from partially
secret circulation into larger public circulation? How do relatively inchoate
structures and sensibilities materialize or take form?"
Stewart's unique poetic and evocative writing style
has been compared to the documentary prose of James Agee. "The writing is
creative nonfiction, about things I saw or heard but condensed and fashioned
through the use of story and voice," explains Stewart. "Often the writing
is about taking a sensibility to its outer limit, trying to track its direction
and force, but figuring out where it could go."
At her October colloquium, Stewart shared the introduction
to her book, written just after September 11th. "I wrote this piece specifically
as a reaction to the thought that 'everything has suddenly changed.' I think,
yes, the attack is a generative event but the sensibilities of everyday life
had already been steeped in the forces that are now snapping into place in a
particular way. And those sensibilities are themselves undergoing an event of
their own. They are both thrown into a free fall, and taking on a stronger form,
mutating under pressure."
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Associate Professor, Department
of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin
