Shooting Snowy Was The Toughest Job I Ever Had now available
by Alex
My paper for Fashioning Anthropology: Papers in Honor of Gail Kelly is now available for download on this website under the ‘writings’ section of the sidebar. It’s entitled “Shooting Snowy Was The Toughest Job I Ever Had: The Role of Dogs in First Contact and Anthropological Theory”:http://alex.golub.name/res/shootingsnowy.pdf. It’s a bit of a romp and (as my scarily erudite beloved once put it) ‘compulsively irreverent.’ Its full of lines like:
One did not write ‘about’ something, one wrote _against_ it. I found I could only get the Comaroffs to read my papers about dogs if I cast them as critiques of pigs. The Papuan pig, I argued, had been the subject of a great deal of anthropological literature while the dog had been unfairly slighted by the suidocentric biases of Western academics immersed in the hegemonic pro-pig tropology of Papua New Guinea’s imperialistic episteme…
Enjoy!
If I mention that you use the word “Foucaultian” (it should be Foucauldian) and the phrase “mass genocide” (as opposed to which other kind?), it is only to prove I read it. Made I laugh, and all.
W.r.t. Latour: I have to read Nous n’avons jamais; is there an anti-Latour chaser you can recommend?
Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Latour. I just think that you get better bang for your buck reading earlier things (like Pasteurization of France) rather than the later and less compelling work he’s produced. In general, his problem is that the things that he says that I find compelling other people (Deleuze, Serres, Garfinkel, etc.) have already said, and the things that are uniquely his own are the bits that are wrong. Also, the style is good, but not all it’s cracked up to be.
Oh, that’s good, thanks.