Hot Hot Ethnographies

by Alex

Let’s assume that you had, say, a c-note to spend at Amazon.com and you just moved to a city which, while a regional center, is not as centrally located to the throbbing, gristly heart of your discipline as the Major Research University you just left. Which ethnographies/theoretical works would you put on your wishlist? Reply in the comments, please.

Typically I think that if you keep your ear to the ground there is a sense — often unspoken — that there are certain ethnographies that everyone is reading. I still remember that disastrous year in the mid-1990s when everyone at the AAAs thought that The Magical State was the most perfect book ever written. Luckily that didn’t last too long. (I don’t mean to suggest it’s a bad book — just that it’s long and difficult to read if you’re not really really interested in Venezuela and that uniquely South American preoccupation with Marx that pops up from time to time). However anthropologists have this sort of hipster indie-rock thing going on — they always want to be the people who read the book first, before it got featured on NPR and everyone read it. So it’s often difficult to get people to ‘fess up.

This makes it difficult to get a clear sense of where the field is going. However it is understandable — a lot of the hip books have trouble standing up to the test of time, when three years from now the international trade in organs isn’t a cause celebre and people wonder why the editor at the press didn’t seem to spellcheck the manuscript. So you don’t want to back a flash in the pan, or be ‘one of those people who was so into ethnography of the homeless back in 2000.’ (again: these are examples. There is good work on both homeless and organ traffic).

So… what have you been reading lately?