Infra-ordinary People | Cara Blue Adams

the practice of paying close attention.

Asya uses anthropology’s tools to regard her own specific life and surroundings with curiosity and distance, allowing her to better understand them and to see their meaning and worth.

If anthropology proved less than revelatory in that case, or rather if what it revealed was only that globalization and technology have made ways of being across cultures increasingly generic, the discipline has equipped Asya with a way to organize her thoughts about the world, which, we learn, has long been useful in making sense of a life without... See more

Bringing an anthropological perspective to bear on her life also makes it clear to Asya that our lives need rituals, which give them meaning and bind us together, as do the rituals that she and Manu have established: “While he made breakfast, I made a pot of coffee and sat with him at the table in pajamas. It was a ritual of sorts, sitting across f... See more

“[mistrust] the woman’s process of abstraction, simply because I’d grown weary of life in the abstract. For most of the people we were acquainted with, Manu and I were nothing more than our countries of origin, our accents, our work. And I yearned for a specific existence.”

Small does not mean inconsequential. These small things are, of course, life itself, and when attended to, become as large as each of our lives is to us.

Why is this important? Because, Perec argued, if we can learn how to “speak of these ‘common things,’” which he describes as “the banal, the quotidian, the obvious . . . the background noise, the habitual,” we can stop doing what we default to, which is to “sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep.” Instead, we can give the fundamental elements... See more

So anthropology grounds Asya. At the same time, the novel gestures to the discipline’s troubled past, with its colonial underpinnings and tendency to exploit, extract, and other its subjects.

By filming the park, Asya hopes to “capture the slow and leisurely rot of a day.”