re: #288 Decatur Deb

Are you trying to do a paper, sort of “Religions of the Oppressed” updated to blog prophets? I was was once planning to do a “Field Guide to the Nut Groups”, but they were spawning and morphing faster than I could catch them. Killgore also has a good eye for interneted movements.

My life experience is anthropology-saturated, I habitually talk like an academic, and I tend to want to understand structure and motion in group behavior, but I wasn’t genuinely thinking of a formal paper. I just find myself dabbling my toes in social science-type thinking. In pukka anthro terms, I was weighing the feasibility of a monograph on an new-media subculture—the stalkers—and how one would go about doing it. You know…following feeds and tweets and FB posts, trying to map migration and leadership dynamics, that sort of thing. Back in the day I was very interesting in the psych/anthro features of hate groups, and the grievance culture of the stalkers is kind of reminiscent, but more similar to the lore and rituals that surround cross-generation feuds.

But I was also making an dry, somewhat oblique joke by using the Yanomamo as point of reference.

I think creating a “Field Guide” would be really tough, even as a lighthearted exercise, both because of the speed of memes and the problem of sourcing. Just to define “being a nut” you’d almost have to build a pseudo-DSM manual of features/manifestations and reify types by proclivity. Modeling in my head, you’d sort of have to map affinity by concepts but also by interaction. Not impossible, but mighty tough to do.