Now I am seven

This is the seventh anniversary of my blog — as its lifespan creeps towards double digits and the number of posts shrinks it seems more and more clear to me that it has become a permanent habit, albeit one lacking in the original drive that I once had for it. This is what happens when you begin reading and writing for a living — at the end of the day squeezing a few words out for a blog is hard. And then after you’ve done that for Savage Minds doing it for your _other_ blog is even harder!

What have I been thinking about this year? It was about this time last year that I realized the natural route out of my dissertation was to begin thinking seriously about Leviathan both in the sense of the concept as it is thrown around in the academy (such that it connects Job and Latour-n-Callon) but also in that it connects two key ethnographic areas for me: the ancient near east and the early modern period in Europe.

The ancient Near East — and a shallow but broad understanding of the contemporary Near East (is that the appropriate term? ‘middle east’? ‘west asia’?) — fit with my intellectual project for all sorts of reasons. Its the center of American politics and my own faith, a flashpoint for anthropological thought on segmentary lineage systems, and one of the first places where social complexity got off the ground. This last bit is the most important: in PNG the question is always “why is everything so hard to hold together” and of course the first place where people really began holding things together (so far as we know) was over there. As a way to continue connecting with my friends who did philological stuff, and to integrate myself into a four field department, learning about this area seemed a good idea.

Of course, there are states and there are states, and early Modern Europe is really the place to go to understand the genesis of the particular disciplinary forms that washed up and receded over PNG. Its also the period when the music I like the most was written, and yet somehow I didn’t know very much about it. The historical sociology of the state, in all its geeky Weberianicity, was a fun topic to return to. Having to teach Foucault to graduate students sharpens one’s interest in this period, and of course this is the period not only of Leviathan, but the air pump (and the birth of social science) so developing some sense of what it is like is important to me.

The other main ethnographic area which sits in the back of my thinking about PNG is, of course, the US. As the implicit contrast with PNG in all descriptions, it sits there in anthropological assumptions as ‘the thing the other place is being contrasted with’ and yet being American and knowing something about the US are quite different things. Consumerism, purchased food, advertising, and so forth all blossomed at the same time as the US, and you need to know something about their history ‘here’ before you understand how what is happening over ‘there’ is different. Reading up on social history of the nineteenth century helps, as does hitting up the ‘founding fathers’ stuff (a sort of late early modern state formation)– as a Californian you tend to think the world started with the gold rush 1848. And of course white colonization of the Pacific rim in the late 19th century has affected by adopted home as well. Finally, learning about American culture is important as I move into my study of American gamers.

Finally, learning about Americans means catching up with qualitative sociology — another one of the things I did this year was figure out what sort of sociological traditions have been running parallel to my own. This meant tracking down the Chicago school and its legacy and, incidentally, the pragmatist Dewey-James-Mead sort of origins of its thought (this brings us right round to 19th century US again). I’m broadly sympathetic — especially as I head towards psychological anthropology — but still can’t learn to enjoy James’s Victorian prose.

There are other themes: mmogs, PNG and more PNG, elites and social networks, the hydrocarbon industry, the sociology and history of anthropology, open access, teaching and pedagogy, but I think I have run out of steam. Hopefully this is at least a partial snapshot of what happened, mentally, for me in 2007.