Infra-ordinary People | Cara Blue Adams

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.

“What’s needed perhaps,” Perec concludes, “is finally to found our own anthropology, one that will speak about us, will look in ourselves for what for so long we’ve been pillaging from others. Not the exotic anymore, but the endotic.”

Over three days in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris , in which he sought to capture the small details that often elude us: “that whi... 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.

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

the practice of paying close attention.

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

“[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.”

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

“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.