Three poems on markets and consumption

Abstract

This account reflects an effort to address the crisis of representation emerging from some of my recent fieldwork on pilgrimage in the postmodern era. Bracketed by the relatively dispassionate field note and the reasonably narcissistic journal entry, each of these particular poems is a liminal playground for the contest between introspection and exteroception. In these poems, I exploit the coincidence of the ethnographic and lyric moment to examine an anthropologist’s engagement with his craft. They address the experience of researcher ambivalence – in this case, the uncomfortable unwillingness to suspend the voice of judgment – occasioned by prolonged immersion in spectacular venues. Neither autoethnographic nor reflexive in any formal sense, these poems invite the reader to participate in the mixed emotions of a persona locked in the embrace of consumer culture, where to resist is to accommodate, and to accommodate, resist. The sites represented in the poems are, respectively, the flagship brand store American Girl Place, the Caribbean port of call Costa Maya, and the temporary autonomous zone of the Burning Man festival.