{"id":264,"date":"2008-08-27T03:08:41","date_gmt":"2008-08-27T10:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=264"},"modified":"2008-08-27T03:27:26","modified_gmt":"2008-08-27T10:27:26","slug":"a-thick-description-of-the-prospective-next-first-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2008\/08\/27\/a-thick-description-of-the-prospective-next-first-family\/","title":{"rendered":"A Thick Description of the (Prospective) Next First Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nothing against Barbara Bush or anything, but I’m practically beside myself that I can use the occasion of an article on a presidential candidate’s mother to refer in context<\/em> to Clifford Geertz.<\/p>\n

Via Language Log<\/a>, there’s a must-read profile<\/a> in Time Magazine about Obama’s mother by Amanda Ripley:<\/p>\n

Each of us lives a life of contradictory truths. We are not one thing or another. Barack Obama’s mother was at least a dozen things. S. Ann Soetoro was a teen mother who later got a Ph.D. in anthropology; a white woman from the Midwest who was more comfortable in Indonesia; a natural-born mother obsessed with her work; a romantic pragmatist, if such a thing is possible.<\/p>\n

As Benjamin Zimmer writes in Language Log, after he gets the principal issue of pronouncing Obama’s sister’s name out of the way:<\/p>\n

So Barack Obama has a half-sister versed in Indonesian figures of speech (regardless of Barack’s own proficiency in Indonesian<\/a>). Not only that, he has another half-sister, on his father’s side, who is trained in Germanic languages and linguistics. According to Spiegel Online<\/a>, Auma Obama<\/a> studied at University of Heidelberg’s Neuphilologische Fakult\u00e4t<\/a> before continuing her graduate work at University of Bayreuth in the Interkulturelle Germanistik<\/a> program. Her dissertation was on literary reflections of the concept of labor. It’s a fascinating extended clan, though you’d never know it watching the Democratic Convention’s genericized depiction of the Obamas as an “all-American family<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

Ripley’s piece, neatly staged in three acts, is broadly sympathetic but expertly done and full of insightful detail; a thick description<\/a>, to use Geertz’s felicitous phrase.\u00a0 And an appropriate one, too,\u00a0 given that Obama’s mother was — like Geertz — an anthropologist of Indonesia who wrote a thousand page disseratation on ‘peasant blacksmithing,’ a classic thick description if there ever was one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nothing against Barbara Bush or anything, but I’m practically beside myself that I can use the occasion of an article on a presidential candidate’s mother to refer in context to Clifford Geertz. Via Language Log, there’s a must-read profile in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-4g","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}