Copious Free Time: Evans-Pritchard Edition

Posted on by Rex

Here are some pieces that I want to read but almost definitely will not get around to. Perhaps you will have better luck?

Sean Kingston has an amazing book on Evans-Pritchard entitled A Touch of Genius: The Life, Work, and Influence of Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. It is just part of SK’s new open access initiative so you will not have to pay the usual US$15,000 that the average SK hardback costs. I’ve skimmed through it. The book is an edited volume, but not an average dull one. It is a sort of group biography of Evans-Pritchard which featured numerous, short, incredibly detailed articles. Many of them are just collections of long quotes from E-P’s associates and friends remembering him. It also includes a high amount of new E-P images, including not just photos from his youth, but of his groceries. It really looks like an amazing postmodern collaborative biography. Highly recommended.

The 1970 volume Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives has reflexive piece by Charles and Betty Lou Valentine on fieldwork called “making the scene, digging the action, and telling it like it is: anthropologists at work in a dark ghetto”. Charles was a white reformed Melanesianist, Betty Lou a Black American, and the article recounts raising their young child during fieldwork. This couple deserves more attention in the history of anthropology.

Bashkow and Shaffner’s obituary of Roy “Coyote Anthropology” Wagner in American Anthropologist is excellent and on an important figure (ok I read this one).

Mediastudies Press have an open access reprint of Irving Goffman’s dissertation, Communication and Conduct in an Island Community. 

Of Course Wikipedia has a list of foods named after people

Saleem Ali has a new book on aluminium: From Soil to Foil: Aluminium and the Quest for Industrial Sustainability. He’s an impressive guy, full of energy. 

Internet history books often don’t age well, but I think Ben Smith’s Traffic will be an exception. His ability to flood my socials is unprecedented. Also, he discusses what I think of as the ‘Savage Minds’ period in Internet History, so it is especially relevant to me.

That’s it for now! Take care.

Published by Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He is a political anthropologist who studies kinship, customary land tenure, and the mining and petroleum industry in Papua New Guinea. He also studies the video game World of Warcraft, and is an advocate for open access scholarly communications. His book "Leviathans at the Gold Mine" was published by Duke University Press.