The Way We Are [Paperback]

In his foreword to Margaret Visser's The Way We Are, John Fraser offers definitions for a new coinage. "Visserism: A concise anthropological insight; an entertainment in which points are made by identifying and skewering absurdities; the doctrine that all scholarship exists to prove that life is rich, funny and meaningful." Fraser edits Saturday Night magazine, which hired Visser in 1988 to write a column called "The Way We Are." The book of the same name collects 60 of these pithy essays, teeming with Visserisms, that explore the cultural significance of everyday objects and phenomena such as jelly, offal, high heels, beards, baked beans, the colour red, tap-dancing, sour tastes, wigs, and the Easter bunny.

Visser traces her interest in "the anthropology of everyday life" to a plastic packet of mustard she encountered when she first arrived in North America from Britain in 1964. She and her companion "sat and looked at the mustard missile, and knew that we had reached a foreign place, an unpredictable and infinitely weird environment." Since then, Visser has produced a string of best-selling, award-winning books including Much Depends on Dinner, The Rituals of Dinner, and The Geometry of Love, "focusing on small humble objects" to "tease out of them philosophies, choices, prejudices, causes, contradictions, tragedies, absurdities." Thus, in The Way We Are Visser re-envisions the heart--"a terrifying, bloody, pumping muscle that throbs and shudders inside us"--as a "multivalent metaphor": seat of courage for the ancient Greeks, of compassion for the modern North American, something that can be, depending on circumstances, "in the right place," "broken," "eaten out" or "worn on the sleeve." She exposes Santa Claus as a phallic symbol: "dressed in red, coming down the chimney, and leaving a present in the stocking." And in chewing gum she sees "an arresting symbol of modernity": "gum is cud-like and primitive, yet it is now impeccably technological." --Russell Prather

Award-winning Toronto author Visser (Much Depends on Dinner) packs a wealth of intriguing information into this collection of witty essays. All but one of the deceptively short pieces were originally published in Saturday Night magazine and have as their subject matter quite commonplace objects and activities of everyday life. Visser's forte is to take the ordinary and turn it into the extraordinary by providing a cultural history of its evolution (each piece has a bibliography). The practice of showering, for example, was considered dangerous and became habitual only in the last 40 years, after central heating. Until the 1900s, when they established themselves as "professionals," doctors and lawyers accepted tips in the same manner that waiters and hairdressers do today. The concept of paid vacations has its roots in 1920s fascist Italy, where workers were ordered to take time off to exercise their bodies. An insightful volume that will delight both fans and newcomers to Visser's writing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Visser, a Canadian author and columnist, has won awards for her previous books, including The Rituals of Dinner (1991), and has acquired a loyal following in the U.S. In this collection of pithy essays, Visser treats us to the full range of her shrewd powers of observation and skilled articulation. Nothing is too small or too commonplace to elude Visser's keen eye and mind. In fact, she finds that paying sustained attention to "small, humble, taken-for-granted objects and demeanors" reveals the underpinnings of society's shifting attitudes and values. Visser analyzes our food preferences, fashion choices from high heels to blue jeans to suntans, and the etiquette of everything from blushing to kissing, tipping, and spitting. She also discusses the differences between floorsitters and chairsitters, the origin of valentines, the evolution of Santa Claus, and the institutionalization of paid vacations. Visser's perfect, exhilarating prose turns on a dime as she negotiates complex twists and hairpin turns of thought with poise and grace. Donna Seaman --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Visser moves on from the culture of food (The Rituals of Dinner, 1991, etc.) to the ``anthropology'' of everyday life, with a series of little essays that originally appeared in the Canadian weekly Saturday Night. It is only appropriate that someone whose introduction to North America 31 years ago was a flying mustard packet should be writing on ordinary things and events. In her introduction, Visser asserts that ``clues can be found to our culture's suppositions'' from an exploration of such randomly chosen but ubiquitous phenomena as baked beans, tipping, and Santa Claus (a particular favorite who turns up in several essays). Drawing on a combination of history, philology, anthropology, and sharp observation, Visser comments wittily on parades (``one of the few Dionysiac outlets still sanctioned by society as a whole''), the Easter Bunny, the invention of vinegar (whose name derives from the French for ``soured wine''), and spitting. Not surprisingly, given that her two previous books dealt with food history and lore, the essays on food and eating are the strongest ones here; an offering on the ingestion of organ meats is particularly clever and laughter-provoking. These essays (each of which is followed by a bibliography) were clearly not intended for consecutive reading, and sitting down with the book for long periods of time is not recommended. Read in large clumps, the essays begin to pall, and a tendency to the pedantic, which in smaller doses is relieved by Visser's warmth and humor, in larger swallows becomes almost overwhelming. The result is a book to be dipped into at random and in short bursts. Reminiscent of, but not as clever as, Roland Barthes's Mythologies. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“She deconstructs taboos, customs and icons…[in a book of] ‘Visserisms’ that will never again let you look at the ordinary as anything other than refreshing and exotic.”—The Toronto Star

“She is the Julia Child of social studies…”— The Globe and Mail

“…erudite, polished, scintillating pieces…”—The Vancouver Sun

MARGARET VISSER is the author of three bestselling books: Much Depends onDinner, which won the Glenfiddich Prize for Food Book of the Year and was named one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly and The New York Times Book Review; The Rituals ofDinner, which won the International Association of Culinary Profession’s Literary Food Writing Award and the Jane Grigson Award in the US, and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year; and The Way WeAre, a collection of witty and insightful essays about the way we live.She was born in South Africa,studied at the Sorbonne, and received her doctorate in Classics from the University of Toronto. She has been a contributing editor to Saturday Night magazine, and has been heard regularly on CBC Radio. Shetaught Classics at York University for eighteen years and now devotes her time to research and writing. Margaret Visser dividesher time between Toronto, Barcelona and southwestern France.