Overview

An illuminating look at how the “generic” is key to how we make meaning in the world.   From off-brand products to elevator music, the “generic” is discarded as the copy, the knock-off, and the old. In The Copy Generic, anthropologist Scott MacLochlainn insists that more than the waste from the culture machine, the generic is a universal social tool, allowing us to move through the world with necessary frames of reference. It is the baseline and background, a category that includes and orders different types of specificity yet remains non-specific in itself. Across arenas as diverse as city planning, social media, ethnonationalism, and religion, the generic points to spaces in which knowledge is both over-produced and desperately lacking. Moving through ethnographic and historical settings in the Philippines, Europe, and the United States, MacLochlainn reveals ways the “generic” is crucial to how things repeat, circulate, and are classified in the world.

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9780226822778

Table of Contents

Reviews

""The Copy Generic is clearly written and well-paced. Its eclectic range of case-studies and careful yet daring trans-contextual work make for a refreshing break from ethnographies that shy away from sustained comparative thinking. MacLochlainn’s dazzling ability to move seamlessly across scales of specificity make this work a key reference for any scholar concerned with questions of context, comparison, mimesis, and generality. . . . The Copy Generic offers an important model for how contemporary anthropological work might push back against the neoliberal fetish of novelty."" * Anthropological Quarterly * ""MacLochlainn takes the reader on a wild romp to demonstrate the significance of recognizing the multifarious cultural work of the generic as template, as universal(izable), as unauthored, and thus as a highly productive ‘blueprint of the social.’ This is not just an outstanding first book, but an audacious reimagining of what a book in our field can be."" * Society for Linguistic Anthropology * “It seems fitting that this wildly imaginative book should defy easy classification. Is it a major work of social theory, offering a sweeping model of cultural circulation, or an exquisite ethnographic monograph, lavishly detailing Christian Filipino worldmaking? Most importantly, MacLochlainn demonstrates that without the generic, any such questions of classification are not just unanswerable, but unthinkable.” -- Graham M. Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Innovative in its form, lucid in its prose, The Copy Generic explains and refuses the tendency to denigrate the generic as inauthentic, barren, or simply irrelevant. Instead, MacLochlainn brilliantly draws out what so many overlook: that is the social and semiotic generativity of the generic."" -- E. Summerson Carr, University of Chicago

It seems fitting that this wildly imaginative book should defy easy classification. Is it a major work of social theory, offering a sweeping model of cultural circulation, or an exquisite ethnographic monograph, lavishly detailing Christian Filipino worldmaking? Most importantly, MacLochlainn demonstrates that without the generic, any such questions of classification are not just unanswerable, but unthinkable. -- Graham M. Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Innovative in its form, lucid in its prose, The Copy Generic explains and refuses the tendency to denigrate the generic as inauthentic, barren, or simply irrelevant. Instead, MacLochlainn brilliantly draws out what so many overlook: that is the social and semiotic generativity of the generic. -- E. Summerson Carr, University of Chicago

Author Information

Scott MacLochlainn is assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

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