Satin Island Read Online Free

motor-oil, his generative fuel. But there’s anxiety and anxiety. With the Project contract won, knowing the weight he attached to it, I, like everyone else in the Company, was now anxious to see Peyman and, through Peyman, to connect: either to some rich and stellar network that we pictured lying behind this name, Koob-Sassen; or, if not that, then at least to … something. Being near Peyman made you feel connected. In his absence, I spent the week wrapping up other briefs that I’d been working on: transcribing audio files, drawing up charts, tweaking documents, drifting around websites. Mostly drifting around websites.
    3.2 What does an anthropologist working for a business actually do ? We purvey cultural insight. What does that mean? It means that we unpick the fibre of a culture (ours), its weft and warp—the situations it throws up, the beliefs that underpin and nourish it—and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product). Ethnographers do field research, creating photomontages out of single moments captured in a street or café; or they get sample citizens—teenagers, office workers, mums—to produce video-diaries for them, outlining their daily routines in intimate detail, confiding to the camera the desires, emotions, aspirations and so forth that visit them as they unload a dishwasher, lace up trainers, or sip foam through that little slit you get in plastic coffee-cup lids. It’s about identifying and probing granular, mechanical behaviours, extrapolating from a sample batch of these a set of blueprints, tailored according to each brief—blueprints which, taken as a whole and cross-mapped onto the findings of more “objective” or empirical studies (quantitative analysis, econometric modeling and the like), lay bare some kind of inner social logic, which can be harnessed, put to use. In essence it’s not that much different from what soothsayers, ichthyomancers, did in ancient times: those wolfskin-clad men who moved from stone-age settlement to stone-age settlement, cutting fish open to tease wisdom from their entrails. The difference being, of course, that soothsayers were frauds.
    3.3 Once, for a brief time, I was famous. My renown came in the wake of my first—and only—major academic study. The study’s subject was club culture. For three years, in the nineties—my mid-to-late twenties—I spent a large portion of my waking (and sleeping) hours among clubbers. I took a barman job in Bagleys; spent off-nights at the Fridge, the Ministry of Sound, the Velvet Rooms and Turnmills; took poppers, speed, MDMA; the lot. By the end I was helping procure venues for illicit raves, helping direct crowds to these through coded messages put out on pirate radio stations, cellular networks and the array of whisper-lines that spring up around this type of dubious activity. I then spent two more years writing it all up. On my study’s publication (first as a doctoral thesis, then, two years later, with me in my mid-thirties, as an actual book that real people could buy), what was generally found to be most notable about it wasn’t the insight it afforded into the demimonde or “mindset” or whatever you want to call it of clubbers, but rather the book’s frequent and expansive “asides” in which I meditated on contemporary ethnographic method and its various quandaries.
    3.4 For example: I considered at great length the question of field. In classical anthropology, there’s a rigid distinction between “field” and “home.” Field’s where you go to do your research, immersing yourself, sometimes at great personal risk, in a maelstrom of raw, unsorted happening. Home’s where you go to sort and tame it: catalogue it, analyze it, transform itinto something meaningful. But when the object of your