Infra-ordinary People | Cara Blue Adams

the practice of paying close attention.

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.

“I found my subjects self-explanatory, if not a little disappointing. . . . It was just life, in a somewhat ugly town. There were afternoon snacks of Fanta and stale vanilla cake. The children that came to the center wore sneakers and had cell phones. They listened to the same pop songs as the rest of the world.”

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.

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

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.

She has come to see, too, the universal in the specific. “All the months that I had been filming, I’d thought that there were so many ways of living, of inhabiting the park,” she says. “I wanted to know as many configurations as possible, all the strange and unique ways. But lately, as I went over the scenes again and again, smoothing their edges, ... See more

“It was often the case, for people our age, that an interesting job was tantamount to being an interesting person,” Asya says of the educated, cosmopolitan set to which she belongs, though she herself rejects the idea.

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