J

J is the curvy, lime green, evil twin brother of G and H. It is the strange, shadowy inversion of normal social science — that Library of Congress call letter which most resembles a decorous and well-trimmed suburb beneath whose apparent normality lies the fact that you are the only person left who hasn’t yet been taken over by the Pod People.

J covers everything that I study but in a reverse, mirror-image way. It’s all there: social structure, politics, philosophy but somehow… its all strangely deformed. There are rows and rows and relevant books that look incredibly relevant to what I study, but unlike H, which gives you that same sense of dysphoria that Ancient Space Travellers used to get from looking directly into the heart of the warp drive, it makes me feel a bit dirty or betrayed somehow, like the bride of a fairy at a wedding feast who tries the delicious morsels only to realize that they are in reality full of maggots and that her handsome prince is really a goat who lives underneath the earth.

In G we describe moots and leadership. In H, people offer technocratic solutions to ethnic conflict. In J, Madeline Albright and five other famous people share the lessons they’ve learned about how to be a great diplomat. In G we ponder the  amplification of agency by cultural structure, in H they develop elaborate formal models of the structures of elite networks. In J they argue about whether Roosevelt or Churchill was the greatest leader of the twentieth century. Do you see what I’m trying to get at here?

There is, of course, one exception to my general disatisfaction with J, and that is JX — the section that for decades housed dusty Wilson-esque tomes on the league of nations until suddenly in the early 90s it exploded (as the Hs did in 2001) into the ‘globalization’ section of the library. I mean honestly: wth is James Ferguson’s Global Shadows doing being stored here? The best thing about the place is that no other anthropologists think to browse it so you rarely have to engage in recall wars with others.

It wasn’t until I got to Hawai’i and started to broaden my imagination about what constituted an adjacent discipline that I really started hitting up the Js. I think in time I am going to ease into them. But it is hard — J is, like C, one of those old, old letters. The sociology of H is, let’s face it, mostly a post-WWII phenomenon and there have been so few people doing anthropology (and the discipline has changed so much) that G is also still relatively wet behind the ears. But J is full of folks still obsessed about the Kansas-Nebraska act. It’s the secondary literature on Democracy, Truth, Freedom, and Efficient Administration of County Government: Lessons From North Dakota, 1923-1947. This is a deep, deep pool — one you have to share with Republicans who take seriously Jefferson’s legacy as a social thinker. Whoah.