The Copy Generic

How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds

Scott MacLochlainn

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English

University of Chicago Press
27 January 2023

Archaeology; Anthropology

An illuminating look at how the “generic” is key to how we make meaning in the world.

From off-brand products to elevator music, the “generic” is discarded as the copy, the knock-off, 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 frames of reference. It is the baseline and background, a category that includes and orders different types of specificity yet remains non-specific in itself. Across arenas as diverse as city planning, social media, ethnonationalism, and religion, the generic points to spaces in which knowledge is both over-produced and desperately lacking. Moving through ethnographic and historical settings in the Philippines, Europe, and the United States, MacLochlainn reveals ways the “generic” is crucial to how things repeat, circulate, and are classified in the world.

By: Scott MacLochlainn
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: 1
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 8mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9780226822778
ISBN 10: 022682277X
Pages: 232
Publication Date: 27 January 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Scott MacLochlainn is assistant professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews for The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds

It seems fitting that this wildly imaginative book should defy easy classification. Is it a major work of social theory, offering a sweeping model of cultural circulation, or an exquisite ethnographic monograph, lavishly detailing Christian Filipino worldmaking? Most importantly, MacLochlainn demonstrates that without the generic, any such questions of classification are not just unanswerable, but unthinkable. -- Graham M. Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Innovative in its form, lucid in its prose, The Copy Generic explains and refuses the tendency to denigrate the generic as inauthentic, barren, or simply irrelevant. Instead, MacLochlainn brilliantly draws out what so many overlook: that is the social and semiotic generativity of the generic. -- E. Summerson Carr, University of Chicago