Vargas Llosa’s Civilization of Spectacle has its uses aside from being a manual on how to state the painfully obvious in the most self-righteous manner ever.
Llosa points out the enormous harm modern anthropology has caused to the concept of culture. At my university, the Department of Anthropology still tries to ban everybody else from using the word “culture” because, according to our anthropologists, nobody should be allowed to talk about culture but them.
Also, Llosa ridicules Bakhtin. This might seem like an outdated project but visit a scholarly conference in my field, and you’ll see Bakhtin trotted out on regular occasions in complete earnestness.
Of course, these ideas are also quite stale. They are, however, marginally a little less stale than everything else in Llosa’s book. Or maybe I simpy like to see them repeated as many times as possible.
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