It has been 10 years since David Simon's "The Wire" premiered on HBO. A product of Simon's long-time partnership with Ed Burns, a retired Baltimore City homicide detective, "The Wire" presented Baltimore through the lens of police officers, drug dealers, troubled children, educators. A Dickensian drama-from-below, Simon's series grew more and more complex through its five seasons. Actively working to challenge easy interpretations of Baltimore's problems, Simon refused to indulge in the usual media reduction of urban life to pathologized caricatures. Over those 10 years, some anthropologists began to include "The Wire" in their courses , presumably because they found it ethnographically interesting . And it is, but not because it offers an empirical "window" onto the lives of Baltimore's urban poor. Instead, "The Wire" is interesting because it presents the complexities of white, middle-class perspectives ...
Occasional posts on anthropologically interesting science fiction, anthropological futures and my own future as an anthropologist.