"This week, I got my collection of National Geographic magazines up at school. You are all welcome to look at them. Please look at them, they are beautiful. Don't cut them up. They are very important to me because I grew up reading National Geographics and having my dad try to work for them..." announced my friend Eric at a recent Slade house meeting, referring to the large boxes of magazines that he so kindly placed in our living room. I haven't seen either Eric or anyone else in the house look at the magazines some or which are from the sixties and seventies. Why the hell does he lug all this crap around I thought to myself. Granted Eric is a pack rat and his room is full of all kinds of random and unnecessary trinkets and curiosities, I think he has a pretty significant cultural attachment to the magazines as well. As Lutz and Collins note, White, middle class Americans used these National Geographic volumes to establish status, while also developing perspectives on the outside world. I think that Eric, a person who hasn't really examined the culture concept, is merely using his massive magazine collection as a cultural signpost for his level of culture and sophistication while trying to subsitute National Geographic's perspective of the outside world for more in depth study. At the same time, I think that Eric also values the magazine's aesthetic appearance over its content. In this way, he didn't want us to cut up his magazines, for fear that we would damage their appearance. Additionally, he has made numerous references to looking at the photographs, indicating that he is not interested in written content as visual content. This perspective plays to the idea forwarded by Lutz and Collins that the aesthetic appearance (sleek and glossy) increased the magazines legitimacy and visual appeal to consumers. Additionally, the fact that Eric found the pictures interesting partially confirms the idea that the photographs produced for the magazine were selected and arranged not to best represent those being photographed, but to appeal to Western consumers visual and cultural paradigms. Regardless of his associations and attachments to National Geographic, I just want him to get his shit out of my living room.