[Linganth] The Copy Generic

[Ilana Gershon]

Dear Colleagues,
Today on the blog, Scott Maclochlainn answers Lynda Chubak's questions
about his new book, The Copy Generic.

https://campanthropology.wordpress.com/

Best,
Ilana

Press blurb: 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.
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