Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

A week or so ago I asked the question “what are the most popular ethnographies today that give you a sense of where the field is going, or at least what is popular right now?” With the help of a few friends, some commentors, a very large gin and tonic, and the internet, I came up with a few names I had never (or only vaguely) heard of before. Let me know if this makes sense of seems completely off to you.

First, Cori Hayden’s new book When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Biomaking of Bioprospecting in Mexica is the only ethnography that was mentioned by two separate people. My weakest area is the New World (the last ethnography of North America I read was Lesser’s “The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game”). Cori is teaching at Berkeley, just finished a leave at Cambridge, and her book came out at Princeton. The blurbs on the back of the book are from Rayna Rapp and Rosemary Coombe, which in the gnomic, haiku-like combinatory game which is ‘blurbs on the back’ indicates a quirky but hip affiliation. In addition bioprospecting is a cool topic. So there you go: When Nature Goes Public.

Another area where I am remarkably shaky is medical anthropology. And this despite the fact that this field seems still to be very very popular. Perhaps it is for this reason that I am the last person in the world to discover the work of Paul Farmer. This is a name I’ve heard around and have now decided to read, thus making me possibly the last person in the world to notice this Harvard-affiliated, NPR-featured author. I mean the guy’s already got a biography out and he’s still churning out books and papers. Aids and Accusation appears on many of the Medical Anthropology syllabi that I looked at, but is now over a decade old. His most recent book, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor is more recent, but seems less ethnographic — a Popular Book For The Educated Layman With Progressive Politics.

My knowledge of Africa is also very, very poor (again, recent ethnographies like “Divinity and Experience Among the Dinka” are about all I can come up with in this area of the world). And when designing a recent Intro Anthro syllabus the way the days worked out I needed a reading on gender with an ethnographic focus in Africa. Who does Gender In Africa? Dorothy Hodgson does, apparently. Once Intrepid Warriors and “Wicked” Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa are just four of the books she’s published in the decade since she got her Ph.D. from Ann Arbor. Plus, unlike most scholars who publish four books in ten years, these actually look to be good.

Also on the hot hot ethnography tip is Carloyn Nordstrom, a cheery scholar who has produced such upbeat volumes as The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror, Fieldwork Under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival, and A Different Kind of War Story. Like Farmer’s most recent book, her Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twneyt-First Century is less ethnography and more public work (and likewise, it’s also part of the University of California’s “Public Anthropology” book series).

There are also numerous runners-up and and Pacific-centric volumes which are worth mentioning. Despite it’s unbelivably ghetto appearence Thomas Hyland Eriksen’s website may be of interest to some. In a recent discussion on anthropology and its relation to the public, a Belgian friend of mine noted that Norway is the only country in the world where anthropologists are taken seriously as public intellectuals. ” ‘What’s going on in Iraq?’ People are demanding,” he said, ” ‘We are very upset that the anthropologists haven’t yet told us what they think about this!’” On his account, Eriksen is responsible for this view in Norway. Yali’s Question: Sugar, Power, and History by Gewertz and Errington has also been published recently. Like many, I was disappointed that their book on the emerging middle class in Papua New Guinea was not up to their usual high standards, and I fear that they may have reached that point where ‘anthropology’ just becomes an exercise in a gracious liberal lifestyle. Still the ambition of the book — to respond critically to Guns Germs and Steel while discussing sugar processing in PNG — is admirable, and if anyone can pull it off it’ll be them.

Also popular with my ASAO homies are two volumes, both focusing on ‘restorative justice’: A Kind of Mending: Restorative Justice in the Pacific Islands and Passage of Change: Law, Society, and Governance in the Pacific. I have a strong sense that ‘restorative justice’ will prove to be the world shaking panacea to match such earlier ideas as “Inegrated Rural Development”. But who and I to poo-poo people trying to make the world a more just and safer place? I suspect that quality of the essays to be uneven, but this is a popular subject, these two volumes are all about it, and Anita Jowitt struck me as very sharp when I met her. A runner up is Holger Jeben’s recent edited volume on Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. There is nothing I care less about than cargo cults. But as a Melanesianist you have to read this literature to keep up. Luckily this volume is chock full of great scholars.

Another one that got a nod was Anna Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Her work is obviously very intelligent, but some consider it bleeding-edge and a little too touchy-feely. A few years ago I had the chance to take a course with her and can confirm that she is not only incredibly intelligent, but also very very kind. She is always bleeding edge, however — sometimes the work is just a little too avant for me to take seriously (I feel the same ambivalence about the His Con people, who she shares a campus with). Having followed her work I feel like I’ll either love this book to death or really have trouble getting through it. One thing is for sure, though: certain professors with aspirations to Greatness and Public Relevance and the idea of ‘friction’ (borrowed from Klausewitz) is central to their Budding Theoretical Structure. So my bet is that if Tsing’s use of this term becomes widespread then their ability to bring their work into the Big Time will become more and more open to doubt.

So there you have it — a few of the books that I would like to, but will never have the time to, read. Let me know if you think I’m missing anything crucial, that you consider this project to be fundamentally flawed, etc. etc.