More ebooks for your Copious Free Time! Rutgers is offering free ebooks related to COVID-19 and, unlike some offers, these books are actually tightly related to this topic, not surprising given Rutgers’s strength in medical anthropology.
Melville House also has some cheap ebook options. These include two buck ebooks of their ten top selling novels (they look great but I probably am too much of a nonfiction reader to ever get to them) as well as free download of Utopia of Rules, Culture as Weapon, and Trainwreck: The Women We Love To Hate. To get the discount you have to enter a secret code which is simply the first word of each book’s title (Utopia, Culture, and Trainwreck). Graeber’s book will be especially relevant to anthropologists.
I will not lie, though — today the deeply-discounted time-killer I splurged on was Endless Space II.
I like ebook sales because they give me an opportunity to obsessively comb through publisher’s lists — which is obviously an incredibly healthy and normal thing to do, of course. Today I spent a few minutes looking at the latest from Verso and Haymarket, two very lefty presses. The occasion was their generous and excellent offer of free ebooks during the COVID-19 crisis. Haymarket’s free ebooks include works by Angela Davis, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and my colleague Yari Bonilla. Verso’s “Free Quarantine Books” include Nancy Fraser and what I suspect is a ruthless takedown of Joe Biden from Branco Marcetic. In addition, Verso is having an 80% off sale on its ebooks, so each one is about 2 bucks US. Verso features these sales pretty regularly. I have a bookmark file with new Verso titles that interest me, and then when the sale pops up that’s when I pick them up.
To be honest, I rarely have a chance to read the ebooks I buy — they are sort of like games on Steam: You buy five for twenty bucks and then it turns out you spend hours and hours with one of them. But just perusing these publishers’ lists is good for keeping up your awareness of your intellectual surroundings. And even just being able to browse these books on your computer can help expand your mind and make some new intellectual connections. As someone in an apartment on an island, I ran out of room for physical books long ago, I’ve learned to let go of the idea that I need a large library. But when I do start worrying that the air to book ration in apartment is skewed too high in the air direction, buying ebooks help me cope. They’re the equivalent of a nicotine patch for compulsive bibliophiles. So if you are looking for a fix, check out Verso and Haymarket.
The joke is that we are supposed to have more free time because we are stuck indoors. But in my case — and I’m sure I’m not alone in this — taking my normal load and then adding child care and moving my classes online is not exactly what I’d call creating free time. Just. The. Opposite.
Of course, I’m very fortunate: I’ll still getting paid, and I’m shut in with other people, not unemployed and trapped alone in my studio apartment, or worse. I recognize that. But there is something tantalizing (as in Tantalus) about the current situation: More and more people in higher education and other realms are ungating more and more content during COVID-2019.
Case in point: Project Muse is ungating huge amounts of content. They’ve always been a good organization with good values who publish good stuff, so the list is long. But I’m particularly interested to see that Oklahoma University Press’s Critical Studies in the History of Anthropology series is now open access. Holy cow — that’s a lot of great work. Long-overdue biographies of groundbreaking female anthropologists like Ruth Landes and Cora Du Bois, the new (and only) biography of Franz Boas, the collected essays of Stephen O. Murray, who passed away not too long ago — the list goes on and on.
So if you have all that Copious Free Time that I wish I had, go take a gander at these and all the other great offerings at Project Muse. You’ll see the history of anthropology is far more complicated than just evil dead white men, although to be fair there are a few of those featured in the book as well! It’s a great resource that spans hundreds of years and most of the continents. Go check it out. And… thank you, Project Muse and Oklahoma!
I’ve done some refreshing of this website, adding a new background (a cc’d image of a William Morris floral textile print, iirc), updating my about page, and, most importantly…. reactivating my timeline of the history of anthropology!
I’ve been working on this timeline continuously for years now but the online version stopped working for some reason and I’d gotten lazy about uploading the source files. But now my timeline page has everything back on it again. You can view the web version online or else download the source files which you can use with Aeon Timeline, the best timeline program I’ve found to date.
Someone in one of the my email lists was asking about the history of semiotics in anthropology, and that made me realise that I didn’t know very much about the subject, so I spent some time googling it. I got particularly interested in Milton Singer, who is interesting to me because he was hugely influential at Chicago, but afaik is basically forgotten today in my field.
A quick google seemed to confirm much of what I already suspected about semiotics: After Worlds War II many people were interested in abstraction and communication — concepts like ‘cybernetics’ and ‘information’ were in the air. As the more humanistically-inclined dug for sources they saw Saussure and Peirce as dual sources for what we now call ‘semiotics’.
In the US Thomas Sebeok was the academic entrepreneur who worked to create semiotics as a new and embracing discipline. In fact, one obituary called him the “pioneer, pathfinder, mentor, midwife, pied piper, kind Midas, gold standard, magician, troubadour, trickster,” and “friend” of semiotics. A more staid LA Time Obituary has further details and no pay wall. Linguistics as a discipline was clearly key here.
According to a short history the first major conference on semiotics was in 1966, around the same time the journal Semiotica was founded. Sebeok was involved in this and a ton of other series, often published by De Gruyter Mouton. It was a highly international affair (as many of those things were in those well-funded days) with American (and Canadian) institutional supports in people like Sebeok, as well as many European anchors. Greimas’s name appears in this literature frequently, for instance. There was also a strong Eastern European influence as well.
To me, ‘semiotics’ in anthropology means ‘Chicago anthropology, especially the work of Michael Silverstein’. Silverstein however, is just part of a larger movement. Today, this approach is well-established in other powerful departments — there is for instance Webb Keane at Michigan and Asif Agha and Benjamin Lee at Penn, Paul Kockelman at Yale, Nicholas Harkness at Harvard, and many others. So by now this tendency in anthropology has the potential to be institutionalised in most of the major departments of anthropology in North America, and seems to me to be a North American phenomenon — I can’t think of many Oxbridge types who think of themselves as doing ‘semiotics’ in this sense. Silverstein was hired by Chicago in 1971. His ground-breaking “shifters” paper was published in 1974.
But Silverstein was not the only person to discuss semiotics at Chicago. Milton Singer (useful obit here) did a philosophy degree at Chicago with Carnap in 1940 and ended up turning into a South Asianist and major force behind Chicago’s Centre for South Asian Studies, often working with Robert Redfield on projects driven by large external grants (here’s another Chicago-based obit). I am guessing war service sent him in that direction? I am sure if I read some of the sources I googled it would all be clear to me.
At any rate, in the late 1970s Singer returned to an interest in earlier questions of meaning, beginning (afaik) with the paper “For a semiotic anthropology” in Sebeok’s edited volume Sight, Sound, and Sense. Other way marks here are his 1984 Man’s Glassy Essence: Explorations in Semiotic Anthropology and 1991’s Semiotics of Cities, Selves and Cultures. While some authors have revisited this work on the whole I at least haven’t heard much about it. I do wonder about his relationship with Silverstein — the two authors were at different ends of their careers.
As a grad student in the 1990s I was assigned works such as Semiotic Mediation (1985) and Signs in Society (1994) (and the earlier papers in it) as examples of the tradition. The 2013 creation of the journal Signs in Societyseems important to me as a sign of the continued vitality of this tendency. When Paul Manning joined the editorial board of Language and Communicationin 2004 I feel like I started seeing several semiotic-style special issues appearing there.
There is more to say about all this, but I wrote this mostly to dump all my open browser tabs into my (outboard) brain, so I’ll stop here for now and let this cursory sketch stay cursory.
Honey and Poi is a history of my synagogue in Hawai‘i. I helped research it and Matt, my collaborator and friend, wrote it. In a short column for USCJ’s online magazine Journeys we talk about being Jewish in Hawai‘i and the lessons we learned about keeping our community strong and vital far from traditional American centres of Judaism on the East Coast. Check it out!
It’s been a very busy time of year for me and so I’ve done a bad job publicising my podcasts for New Books Network, and this despite my how interesting the authors and book are which I’ve been talking about! So for the record go listen to:
Both authors were great to interview. King’s book is a fresh, accessible history of Boasian anthropology which is clear-eyed about the drawbacks of the discipline but ultimately is very supportive of it. Kulick’s book is a funny, sad, personal, and not too politically correct account of his work in the Sepik and the difficulties he faced there, including some pretty harrowing violence.
That’s it for now. More soon, and I hope you enjoy these interviews!
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (CEA) is a peer-reviewed, open access reference work with some great topics and authors. It does a great job of making anthropology available to the public. The pieces are much longer than a normal encyclopaedia article, they are signed, and they have citations — my piece is basically a condensed literature review. The accessibility of the entries varies widely. Some are really good for the general reader, while others are more specialised. But over all I think the project is very useful and I’m glad I contributed to it.
There are a lot of long, more in-depth reviews of the anthropology of mining out there. I think especially of the reviews by Godoy, Ballard and Banks, and Jacka in Annual Review of Anthropology. But if you don’t have access to that serial, or if you just want something shorter, I hope you’ll take a look at my piece. It was a mind-expanding, exhausting experience trying to synthesise al the literature I had to read for it. In particular, I learned that I will never be able to keep up with the massive streams of work on ASM (artisanal and small-scale mining) issuing forth out of Europe. But it was still a fun challenge to do my best. If you think I totally mischaracterised your work or anyone else’s… let me know. And if I didn’t then hey… maybe this piece will be valuable in the long run to people new to anthropology and mining!
