The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds - Softcover

MacLochlainn, Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022682277X ISBN 13: 9780226822778

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2022

Synopsis

An illuminating look at the concept of the generic and its role in making meaning in the world.

From off-brand products to elevator music, the “generic” is discarded as the copy, the knockoff, 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 blueprints, templates, and frames of reference. It is the baseline and background, a category that orders and values different types of specificity yet remains inherently nonspecific in itself. Across arenas as diverse as city planning, social media, ethnonationalism, and religion, the generic points to spaces in which knowledge is both overproduced and desperately lacking. Moving through ethnographic and historical settings in the Philippines, Europe, and the United States, MacLochlainn reveals how the concept of the generic is crucial to understanding how things repeat, circulate, and are classified in the world.

About this title

About the Author

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

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022682277X
• ISBN 13: 9780226822778
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241