South by Southwest hipsters image, courtesy of Todd Dwyer (Flickr 2009)America appears to be confronted by a sinister wave of indifference, inauthenticity, and shallow irony, but somewhat surprisingly the threat arrives wearing tight jeans and flannel shirts, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, listening to Belle and Sebastian on their iPod, shopping at open-air markets, and sporting strategically mussed-up hair. Each time their death rites are read, these “hipsters” seem to again be resurrected by critical observers decrying insincerity or foreseeing the end of Culture.The most recent volleys of disdain, parody, and moralizing over hipsters come from the unusual intersection of Francophone literary scholar Christy Wampole and the most prescient of all popular cultural mirrors, The Simpsons. These and more than a decade of observations on hipsters betray deep and consequential anxieties about consumer society and mass culture. However, they rarely reveal anthropology’s essential humility in the face of difference, respect for everyday experience, or appreciation for cultural and social complexity. It is very difficult to fathom understanding a social group or their broader sociocultural context without some fundamental respect for those people and their voices, yet that is precisely what we see missing in most hipster commentaries.Wampole’s New York Times essay How to Live without Irony laments the shallow materiality of the hipster, who “tries to negotiate the age-old problem of individuality, not with concepts, but with material things.” Her critique of hipster consumption is a familiar refrain that somewhat romantically imagines a counter-culture steeped in creativity, strategic politics, and authenticity. In 2008, for instance, Adbusters’ Douglas Haddow hyperbolically lamented, “An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning.” [Read the rest of the article]: Authentic cool: Global hipsters and consumer cultureAuthor informationPaul MullinsChair, Professor Department of Anthropology, Indiana University-Purdue University at Docent, Historical Archaeology, University of OuluProfessor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), where he teaches archaeology, popular culture and applied anthropology. His research focuses on the relationship between racism and material consumption. Paul also writes about doughnuts in American history, trans-Atlantic material culture, and Finnish ruins. He blogs about his work on his website, Archaeology and Material Culture, and on the Society for Historical Archaeology's President's Corner.Original article: Authentic cool: Global hipsters and consumer culture©2013 PopAnth - Hot Buttered Humanity. All Rights Reserved.
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