He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his 2022 book, The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds, and reported the following:
If one opens The Copy Generic, I’m not fully sure you would immediately be able to decipher the main themes and thrust of the book. Out of the entire book, page 99 might actually be one of the least legible in terms of the overall thematic! But the chapter that it is part of, Chapter 3, “Source Mimesis: How We Think about the Unauthored and Collectively Owned,” I think does a good job of capturing the book’s overall argument. The book is concerned with describing the importance of the concept of the “generic” for understanding how we collectively navigate and sort through different worlds of media and meaning. So rather than dismissing generic things as copies and knock-offs, or the culturally disused, I argue in the book that to think about the generic is actually to think about how we produce and rely on universals and shared backdrops, and how we need easily accessible ways to categorize and sort things in the world in order to make sense of everything. That can be using generic language, shared templates for urban infrastructures, or musical genres on Spotify. Because I’m an anthropologist, part of the book is ethnographic, with the latter chapters describing how different Christian groups in the Philippines have forged a “generic Christianity,” that is how a shared, baseline form of Christianity had slowly emerged among a community, sometimes as a way to overcome religious difference and sometimes to try to convert one another.Learn more about The Copy Generic at the University of Chicago Press website.
Chapter 3, and page 99, is about media and copyright law, and other spaces that highlight how we need to start thinking differently about ownership and authorship in order to avoid remaining stuck in the quagmire of seeing everything as either originals and copies. While we are increasingly living amidst a social milieu in which the coherence of originality and authorship are fraying at the edges (the recent emergence of AI highlights this—what or who is the origin and author of a piece of writing on Chat GPT?), we often revert to such concepts when we start talking about ownership. Why is this so? The legal system, for example, still struggles with drawing clear lines in copyright and patent law, and inevitably relies on determining some space of originality to be the place in which real value (and thus ownership) inheres.
On page 99, I happen to be discussing something very different—the Irish experience with world’s fairs in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In exhibitions in the Irish capital, Dublin, the country was presented as a modern, cosmopolitan European nation, while at world’s fairs such as those at Chicago in 1893, or St. Louis in 1904, one found readymade full rural and “authentic” Irish villages, laden with Celtic designs and with people handweaving and cooking over open fires. Interestingly, it was often the same people organizing (or authoring) the two versions of Ireland on display. On page 99, I describe how these representations were similarly predicated on well-known generic types of thinking about Ireland and national cultures. Of course, somewhat ironically, the bucolic, parochial aversion Ireland ended up being the most modern version, predicting as it did the future of global tourism, and the commodification of culture, something that Ireland ended up at the centre of a century later.
--Marshal Zeringue
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