G
by Alex
G is, to me, a deep dark green. It is also my home: the anthropology stacks. In the Regenstein you could always tell when a new subject or academic discipline was starting by the long stretches of identically-jacketed periodicals, one after another, forming a visible block on the shelves like the strings of identically coded DNA that tell ribosomes “new gene starts here new gene starts here new gene starts…” I’m not sure why Hamilton doesn’t have this same effect — I think its because back issues of journals are stored at Sinclair and, let’s face it, we don’t have the ginormous serials budget I’m sure the Reg has.
It is not actually until you get to GM and GN, I believe, that you hit the real anthropology. It’s strangely placed. I remember at one point following the Gs all the way along the stack until the anthropology ran out and other subjects began flowing through the library, morphing subtly in ways that both suggested and yet rendered enigmatic what the actual LOC topics were, and what logical string of associations would lead from anthropology to the others. I mean it gets weird pretty quickly. Not too long after ‘culture’ you start getting to ‘entertainment’ — the small literature on gaming that I sometimes take a look at for my WoW research is GV (or GX?). It’s a wonderful little trove of books about chess, edited anthologies by cultural studies people thinking about video games, and passionate, self-published treatises on the philosophical aspects of fantasy role playing games. There is also a section on carnivals, entertainments, and sideshows and even, as I recall, a section of ‘dwarves and their cultural significance”. The Reg’s selection of semi-ethnographic books about sideshows and carnivals from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were somethings I always thought would be fun to dip into.
As for anthropology, truth be told I cannot remember too many of the specific numbers that I’ve read through, because one’s relationship to a library is an embodied, physical thing, not a digital one. I can imagine the books on the shelves as I pass them: the AES monograph series (so important and yet so hard to track down in electronic databases), books on particular anthropologists (the Mead/Benedict/Lowie section), anthropology textbooks (which is GN26, I believe) –
– let’s stop to take a second to talk about anthropology textbooks. When did they get to be so terrible? Kroeber’s Anthropology (1948) is just wonderful, Linton’s Study of Man (1936) is fun, and Goldenweiser’s various popularizations — with their denouncements of colonialism and fictional dialogues in which students debate teachers over the meaning of civlization — are wonderfully kooky and eccentric. I blame the materialists and evolutionists: their humorless obsession with aping the natural sciences are rigid determination to follow the baby-book gravy train down the road of multiple editions of their band-clan-chiefdom-inspired textbooks took all the fun out of anthropology. One of these days I’m going to write a proper Boasian textbook and get us right again… –
At any rate then there are some additional volume on general anthropological topics until you get to the end of the row where the edited volumes on ‘what its like to do fieldwork’ are (106?). Turn around, face the other row, and you get evolution, ecology (with an outcropping of indigenous people), a brief intriguing section of play and creativity, and then the topics — kinship, political anthropology, ethnicity, legal anthropology and land rights… and so on.
Somewhere in there — I think it might be in the normal Gs, it was on the end of one row back in the Reg — is another small outcropping of PNG ethnography: specifically, the stuff that counted as ‘ethnography of the…’ instead of just ‘papua new guinea, people’. The Big Men, Great Men edited volume is there, for instance, as are some A. Strathern productions.
While I wax lyrical about the Ds, I have a more workmanlike relationship with G. It is the garage, not the showroom floor. Since I am now a ‘political anthropologist’ (we didn’t have ‘subfield’ titles where I went to school — I was just an ‘anthropologist’) responsible for teaching students about ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationalism’ I find myself spending a long time sitting on the floor, thumbing through the Gs, doing remedial skimming. Its fun, but G is one of those areas of the library – like H or even the more treacherous J — where your head will explode if you let the intellectual horizons stretch too far out into the distance.