Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

After a month of traveling literally from Beijing to Bangor I’ve managed to wrap up a very nice trip to China as well as to my Scarily Erudite Beloved’s parents and future affines). Most of my time was spent knocking around rural China looking for ancient temples and visiting millennia-old graves. This sounds cool, and it was. But trust me — “looking for ancient temples and visiting millennia-old graves” really means “hours and hours taking the bus around rural china.” Nevertheless, I had a wonderful time and have many insights into modern and ancient China, Buddhism, and the human condition more generally. However, since over educated white guys musing on their encounter with East Asian culture is one of the internet’s most overdone cliches, I’ll spare you the details and tell you instead what I thought about the reading I took along.

_The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir_
I got about two pages into this and realized why I disliked existentialism — the endless dreary tone. Also the book is quite challenging and I had little concentration or time to read with a pencil (which I alays do for ‘real’ books I read) so: I didn’t read it.

_The Iliad, trans. Robert Fitzgerald_
I’m strangely triangulated to the classics through my time at Reed and Chicago. Picking this up once again is like meeting an old flame and remembering why you first fell in love — and why it couldn’t last. Just comparing the book in my hands — the same one I read my freshman year of college — with my memory of it was interesting. For instance: I forgot Diomedes existed. I was more attuned to the poetry of Fitzgerald’s translation, which was indeed remarkable. But after a while it drops away in front of a narrative which, as my scarily erudite beloved points out, reads like console text of Worlds of Warcraft: “Diomedes attempts mighty cleave against Agithor. Hit (13+12=25 vs 18 AC). Damage: 32 -5 soak. Darkness covers Agithor’s eyes.” The events described resonate more with me now as an anthropologist — I was struck by the irony of people being obsessed with honor and achievement while living in a world where everyone (the gods included) are incredibly permeable to the influence of others. Overall, I was glad I read it. Good to come home. I look forward to reading it again in 2015.

_Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, M.I. Finley_
This is Finley’s contribution to the whole 1970s slavery thing that produced books like _Roll Jordan Roll_. It is very _very_ short and also very technical and very Finley and very well-done. If you’re interested in the topic as a specialist than go for it, but if you’re only going to read one book by Finley (or even one book of essays) this shouldn’t be it.

_We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Philip Gourevitch_
I haven’t seen the film, but the book deserves all the kudos it gets. Excellent. Hats off to Gourevitch. I just wish it had more of a scholarly apparatus (bibliography, index, etc. etc.) — that must mean I’m a professor or something. This definitely fall into the ‘If You Only Had To Read One Book’ category — if you only had to read one book on Rwanda, this is the one. Today Gourvetich’s critcisms of the UN and the world of NGOs is par for the course. At the time it was prescient — he was writing when Kaplan’s ‘Coming Anarchy’ narrative of the post-cold war revival of primordial ethnic hatred was everywhere. Gourvetich historicizes the genocide in Rwanda and has an eye for the nitty-gritty ‘whats-going-on-on-the-ground’ stuff that is truly gratifying — especially when combined with his clear, moving prose.

_The Gold Coast, Kim Stanley Robinson_
Mediocre. Not sufficiently detailed in it’s futuristic background to be interesting alternate history, and not sufficiently well written — despite Robinson’s obvious skills — to hold literary interest. Vaguely interesting as an example of late cold war sci-fi.

_Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman_
Fluff! Fluffy glorious fluff fluff! A picaresque little novel featuring unchallenging, industry standard prose with a gimlet eye. A fun romp.

_A Signal Shattered, Eric Nylund_
While Neverwhere demonstrates how fun it can be to eat the entire bag of chips, A Signal Shattered reminds you why you don’t do it very often. The characters are two dimensional and occasionally downright embarassing — sexy asian cyborg assasin girlfriend anyone? — and despite pretensions to hardness the sci-fi verges on fantasy. I have to admire the brisk plotting and page-turner quality since it managed to get me to finish the book despite its other numerous drawbacks. I wouldn’t reccomend it.

_Melal, Robert Barclay_
I’m a hundred pages away from finish at the moment. Ethnographically rich, but so far the prose is remarkably pedestrian.

_Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree, Albert Wendt_
I was really afraid that I wasn’t going to like Albert Wendt, and in fact the short stories here range from OK to bad. However, Flying Fox In A Freedom Tree is itself superb — I was much more bowled over by it then I thought I would be. There is a lot — a _lot_ more Albert Wendt in my future.

_Tale of the Tikongs, Epeli Hau’ofa_
I was afraid that I was not going to like this slender lampoon of development in the Pacific. It is another book that Pacific academics and policy types have all read. My big fear was that it would not be as good as _Progress at Mbananakoro_ by O.H.K. Spate. Unfortunatly, I was right. Hau’ofa’s stories are good, but they’re not great — and they can be a bit heavy-handed at times. Spate’s send-up of development politics, on the other hand, is wickedly funny and the stereotypical characters — the development worker, the local politico — are much more finely drawn than in Hau’ofa’s work. I feel a bit bad saying this, since one represents the viewpoint of a Pacific Islander and is couched in traditional forms of story-telling and so forth, while the other is written by a former ‘expert’ of the colonial regime. But what can I say — one is better than the other and _Tale of the Tikongs_ is strong, but it’s not the strongest thing Hau’ofa has produced. For that I’d reccomend “A New Oceania: Our Sea of Islands” — an essay I think everyone who has anything to do with the Pacific should read.

_Guests Of The Sheik, Elizabeth Warnock Fernea_
Why isn’t this course being taught in every introduction to anthropology class? Not only is the prose pellucid, but it deals carefully and thoughtfully with issues of gender, religion, fieldwork in a very satisfying way that leaves tons of room open for discussion. And it’s about ISLAM and set in IRAQ which is sort of on people’s radar screen these days, you know. True it is hopelessly heteronormative, and I can see why a certain flavor of 70s feminism might have not found favor with it, but I can already tell this book will be a staple of my teaching for the forseeable future.

_Eon, Greg Bear_
Very satisfying — a bit like _When Worlds Collide_ combined with _A Deepness In The Sky_. A gradual escalation in scale combined with good pacing and three dimensional (if not deeply textured) characterization makes this a good novel depsite its being the Nth reiteration of the Rendezvous With Rama/Ring World theme. I’d reccomend it.

_Consider Phlebas, Iain Banks_
Two pages into this I realized I’d already read it. I meant to take along _Player of Games_. As far as this book goes, I think it was the turning point when I stopped thinking of Iain Banks as ‘wildly inventive’ and began thinking of him as ‘undisciplined’. I like the idea of super-intelligent space ships, though.

_World Enough and Time, Dan Simmons_
Dan Simmons wrote _Hyperion_ and _Fall of Hyperion_, which are two of my favoritist sci-fi books _ever_. So when I saw this collection featured a story entitled “The Ninth of Av” I thought: “aha!” Unfortunately that story sucked, as did the other story in the collection set in the Hyperion universe. The final two stories are worthwhile, and the author’s introduction features some interesting insights into how Simmons thinks about writing and criticism. I don’t think that poorly-understood Foucault and yet another American version of Zen is really the way to go, but it was interesting to see what he thought. This may be worth checking out of the library. Maybe.

_Murmur, J Niimi_
J is a good friend of mine and so I would have felt really bad if I had to write a review of his book and say that it was suck. Luckily this short volume dedicated to REM’s first LP is not suck. In fact its really, really good. The book does an admirable job of tacking back and forth between a very sophisticated discussion of how the equipment used to record the album to personal reminiscence about the 80s zeitgeist into which it was released to the nature of lyrics themselves. The book doesn’t just talk about the kudzu-filled cover — it talks about the natural history of Kudzu in the south. Given it’s small size it’s not clear what genre of book this is supposed to be, and this shows at times when certain narratives are expanded or contracted. Also, J spends a fair amount of time doing ‘boundary setting work’ discussing the nature and function of art criticism, the history of influence, and so forth — a tendency I’d chalk up to the fact that it is his first book, or the akward length he’s been assigned. Luckily, even when the discussion strays from REM to the role of the critic, it is still interesting to see him work through the issues (particularly his relationship with academia). So remember: J Niimi. You heard it here first.

_Joystick Nation, J.C. Hertz_
After a brief flirtation with christmatic megafauna, I’m back on course with the video game project, and doing a lot of remedial reading. This is a classic that everyone but me who thinks about videogames has read, except now, since I’ve read it too. It’s dated, and some more recent stuff has updated and replaced individual chapters, but the book still shines and is at times laugh-out-loud funny. I can see teaching the chapters on “Why Doom Rules” and “A La Recherhce du [sic] Arcades Perdu” — which (unfortunately) does not riff off of Benjamin and Proust nearly as much as it should.

_Everything Bad For You Is Good For You, Steve Johnson_
Steve Johnson took my money _again_. I read his _Emergence_ at the same time I read _Linked_ — a similar book written by a scientist who studies science. I didn’t understand at the time why Johnson was being so hyped when _Linked_ was so much better. So I picked up _Interface Culture_, the first book to establish him as a popular science writer during the internet boom. I disliked intensely. I swore he wouldn’t get any more of my money. However, _Everything Bad_ has a section on video games, it was favorably reviewed in the New Yorker and other such forums, I thought I might be able to teach it, and the only library in Honolulu that has it has it checked out and waitlisted. So I paid my money and read it on the plane. Don’t bother. _Everything Bad For You_ is bad for you. Steve Johnson took my money _again_.

_In Praise of Theory, Hans-Georg Gadamer_
I was going to take along _The Enigma of Health_ but took this instead. It’s a collection of the essays in which Gadamer articulates most clearly his diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity. Unfortunately Gadamer — a philosopher who once admitted that he “only read books at least a thousand years old” and who was almost late to his own dissertation defense because his coat has frozen to the door of his rural, unheated house — is not at his best here. There isn’t any original social diagnosis, and from the point of view of an American who grew up with electricty his rural German suspicion of technology seems naive. Even the artle on the philosophical relevance of the hand to modernity — which could be great — is disappointing. So no, this is not Gadamer’s strongest work — at least not he essays I read.