Happy Thanksgiving, Althusser Style!

A year ago, a wonderful professor at the University of Chicago taught some master’s students about Althusser’s theory of ideology in “Ideology and the State” using the Thanksgiving hand turkey. In short—to try to write an analytical piece months after graduate school—Althusser’s ideology is a social, political, and economic structure in which individuals self-identify in relation to their labor. In other words, we self-identify through the work we repeatedly do within the social, economic, and political environment we live in, which ultimately reinforces these systems. The hand turkey can be understood as a representation of Althusser’s ideology because Americans recognize the bizarre image of an outlined hand with red and orange crayon as the representation of a turkey, which in turn represents Thanksgiving. We can only recognize this image, which looks nothing like a turkey and could represent many other things beside Thanksgiving, because we are within a system that taught us to make the hand turkey as children for Thanksgiving. In making the hand turkey repeatedly every year in grade school (our labor), we self-identify (those who celebrate Thanksgiving) through our work within an economic, political, and social structure (America), thus reinforcing the system (we know that hand turkeys mean Thanksgiving).

So, happy Thanksgiving from Snaps!