A book forum on Scott Maclochlainn The copy generic (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The book was the co-winner of the 2023 Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s New Voices Book Prize. In its announcement, the selection committee said: ‘MacLochlainn takes the reader on a wild romp to demonstrate the significance of recognizing the multifarious cultural work of the generic as template, as universal(izable), as unauthored, and thus as a highly productive ‘blueprint of the social.’ This is not just an outstanding first book, but an audacious reimagining of what a book in our field can be’.

2 Interestingly the philosophical anthropology that also emerged at this time did not take the diversity of peoples as its object of study but that of human nature.

3 Some have moved the other way and tried to narrow the notion of the ‘generic’. In his own series of writings, Zuckerman (2020; 2021a; 2021b), for instance, followed a line of research in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology and used the ‘generic’ to describe a particular kind of reference which ‘predicates properties directly of a kind’ (Leslie 2015, 4) and is ‘deictically non-selective’ (Agha 2007, 44). This notion of the generic interacts with but is distinct from other uses of the term to describe say, generic drugs. For Zuckerman’s project, these bits of polysemic baggage were better abandoned on the platform.

4 Here is how Eleanor Rosch (2011, 92) defines this classic, and now much maligned, view of categories: ‘(a) they have to be exact, not vague, that is, have clearly defined boundaries; (b) their members have to have attributes in common that are the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the category; and (c) it follows that all members of the conceptual category are equally good with regard to membership—either they have the necessary common features or they do not’.

5 Supporting this idea, MacLochlainn writes: ‘my argument throughout this book is that things being classified as generic is the result of a huge amount of semiotic work, sometimes intentional, sometimes not. That is, in some ways, nothing is inherently generic, it is always made to be so, just as scientists have to work to construct folk taxonomies’ (55). The generic could also, of course, as Gershon suggests, be something that unites these two possibilities, something which is both a fundamental dimension of semiotic life and something that people orient toward.

6 A Paredes suggests, the book prompts the question, ‘Who is labeling the Philippines with notions of a generic culture on the ground?’