Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

One of the conversations that I hear quite frequently in anthropology go something like this:

A: “Have you read X’s book yet? It’s fabulous.”

B: “No. Is there an article?”

‘Is there an article?’ means ‘surely the central argument of the book has been presented in a much shorter form which I can read quickly and for free.’ This is due to anthropology’s strange publishing cycle. You produce an enormous dissertation, then afterwards you realize the dissertation’s main idea can really be summarized in a single article — and that you need to start publishing. Then the article appears. Then you revise the dissertation based on the clarification of the article and publish the book. Typically reading the article is not really the same as reading the book, although not always — the article version of _Inalienable Possessions_, for instance, is considered by some to be superior to the book version.

So there’s an art to ‘finding the article.’ It makes it easier to keep up with anthropology, and also a _lot_ easier to teach it to students who can swallow articles but not books.

I was struck recently by two articles which both do a good job of summing up a lot of other work. Marshall Sahlins’s “Structural Work: How microhistories Become Macrohistories and Vice Versa”:http://ant.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/5/1/5 is perhaps the best 26 page digest of “Apologies for Thucydides”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0226734005/qid=1114476101/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-9107879-9896039?v=glance&s=books that you’re likely to find. Similarly, Michael Silverstein’s lengthy article “‘Cultural’ Concept and the Language Culture Nexus”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/journal/issues/v45n5/045001/brief/045001.abstract.html is (I think) meant to be a summary of Silverstein’s thought over the past couple of years. At any rate it seems very much to me to be a summary of his well-known ‘language and culture’ course. It is also more accessible than his other stuff. I think if you had to read one article by Silverstein this is the one — it thus replaces the metapragmatics paper that some of you may have worked through in the past as the definitive piece of Silversteiniana