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Savage Minds has a recent entry that briefly comments on the discipline having “shot itself in the head,” in the context of marketing books. The ensuing discussion there (and my comments here as well) have to do with why this is the case and how it …

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The question is, how do we build up a market, an audience—I don’t think “writing more accessible books” begins to address that.

I agree. So, I offer for your consideration Ohnuki Takuya’s “Five Hurdles.” Ohnuki is one of Japan’s most successful advertising creatives—someone who has, in fact, succeeded dramatically in building up markets/audiences. His topic is advertising, not academic writing. But what he says, I believe, applies to communication in general and may, thus, inform our efforts to make anthropology not only more accessible but more attractive as well.

1. Be Eye-Catching: In a world overwhelmed by information, you have to grab the audience’s attention.

2. Make News: Unless you offer something new, even if only a new angle on an old subject, your work won’t be memorable.

3. Keep It Simple: Too many people err in trying to achieve 1. and 2. by being too esoteric. In today’s busy world, people don’t have the time to figure out what you are trying to say.

4. Add Value: Yes, you must add sizzle to the steak. Better yet is a sauce that makes the steak even more delicious. Remember, too, that criticizing the competition only subtracts value from them; it doesn’t add value to what you have to say.

5. Move the Product: In the corporate world the Holy Grail is to boost sales. In other contexts, your aim might be to mobilize supporters for a cause or transform an academic discipline.

WARNING: I have, I freely admit, adapted Ohnuki’s hurdles to fit our particular case instead of simply translating them.

That said, it’s not too hard to see how they might apply to academic publishing.

1. Does the title or cover art grab a non-academic reader?
2. Does the content say something important and genuinely new TO THAT READER? [Put aside the fact that the author has invested years of her life in doing the research and writing the book and, naturally enough, is deeply invested in the value of what she has done. Put aside the fact that while the people she is writing about may now be people that, because of this investment, she cares deeply about. While an ordinary reader who reads this book find something in it that deeply touches him or her?]
3. Is it easy to read? [The assertion that complex subjects demand complex language and complicated arguments is, IMHO, 99% bogus. Yes, there are subjects, quantum mechanics for example, where George Steiner's observation that science has moved to a place inaccessible to ordinary language is entirely accurate. But anthropology? There is no excuse for writing less easy to read than, say, Stephen Gould.]
4. Does the book transform THE READER’s sense of self or the world that we share?
5. Does THE READER end the book more interested in anthropology and eager to learn more? [If the answer is "No," the author is only preaching to the choir.]

One can’t help thinking that if these sorts of criteria were given equal weight with citing everyone who will turn nasty if their names don’t appear in the references and using the latest “theory,” a.k.a., professional jargon, anthropology might be more influential.

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There is room in our field for a Barbara Ehrenreich or, better yet, a Stephen J Gould — a space vacated by Harris, Benedict, Mead, Geertz (yeah, Geertz is still writing, but the “good stuff” is as old as I am) — but that shouldn’t be a standard applied across the discipline. Again, while I think we should be asking ourselves how some segment of our work might be made more accessible, it’s important that this issue applies not just to anthropology but to the humanities and social sciences as a whole — how many working economists (aside from Stieglitz) have books at Kramerbooks? How much contemporary literary criticism (aside from Bloom)?

The answer to how to make anthropology more public doesn’t, I think, encompass only writing style — there are plenty of literary-minded anthros who write beautifully, such as Basso, whose work I don’t recall seeing at Kramerbooks. The issue runs a lot deeper than that — books in general aren’t a very popular medium for a large segment of American consumers (I don’t know about elsewhere). A lot of the issues that anthros care passionately about aren’t even on the radar of a lot of people — so most publisher’s marketing divisions aren’t going to see much of a market ourside of academia, so msot bookstore buyers aren’t ever going to hear about the book in the first place, let along prop it up on the New Releases table. So the question is, how do we build up a market, an audience — I don’t think “writing more accessible books” begins to address that.

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I am on record as believing that cultural studies has systematically removed itself not just from real world usefulness but from any intellectual vantage point that would allow us thoughtfully to examine, as opposed tediously to condemn, the interactions of culture and commerce.

The question has long been who would step up and create a program in the excluded middle? Who would establish a rapprochment between these two worlds? Who would create a program that was fully informed and fully engaged?”

And this, in conjunction with your other initial data point, seemed to suggest that anthro as a whole, or that part of anthro which takes culture seriously, tediously condemns the interactions of culture and commerce. Another comment on the McCracken blog pointed that way too.

So my theoretically-eclectic list is an effort to point out that this is nonsense. The rapprochement that McCracken tediously calls for, in multiple rhetorical questions, has in fact been ongoing for years. And there is plenty of older work like Geertz’ _Peddlers and Princes_ that is both culturally acute and sympathetic to commerce.

So it can’t be that anthro books don’t sell because they hate commerce. On the much larger question of why people buy books, or what interests readers, I really know nothing, and speculative reader-response theory gets tendentious. I might point out, though, that with the arguable exception of Halperin none of the books on my little list is really about “poverty.” Hernando de Soto is an interesting figure, but anthro he’s not. We could just as well point out that self-help books outsell academic monographs.

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Likewise, every scholarly generation has its egregious crimes against good sense and readability (componential analysis, anyone?). Elegantly phrased insight is always rare; if you add wit, all the more so. Marshall Sahlins is super famous because his writing stands out and has stood out for decades now — not because post-whateverism has turned everything to crap and there’s nothing worth reading anymore. Maybe too many books are being published that will never find a readership — but my guess is that the ratio of books *worth* reading to books published is more or less the same as it ever was.

now I must go and jump around.

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More interesting was the fact that the same editor suggested that many anthro books become better and better sellers as time goes on, and that it is impossible to know in the first two years, which books will be hits– which obviously conflicts with the fact that the entire publishing industry, including the academic presses, are organized around marketing and promoting books at their appearance, not at the point at which the discipline sorts the wheat from the chaff. That’s a fundamental conflict of interest, I say.

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Since, however, I haven’t yet read the books, allow me to hazard a speculation, based on the titles alone, to how you and others respond to it.

I can imagine a commodity trader being interested in the Billig, reading it in the way that I’ve had business students read Brian Moeran’s A Japanese Advertising Agency, i.e., intrigued by an inside account of a business in which they were interested but, alas, turned off by the references to anthropological theory.

I’ve seen a fair amount of business press coverage of the family firms that dominate the haute couture/luxury brand industry in Italy, so I can also imagine a business audience for Yanagisako’s work.

The others, based on titles alone, strike me as potentially appealing to a similar audience as that which reads, say, Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickled and Dimed. The difficulty here is, as I know from being active in Democrats Abroad, that most people stateside with a serious interest in poverty or, more broadly, how people make ends meet at the lower end of the globalizing economy already have tons to read about people for whom ( whether it be for ethnic, regional, or whatever other reasons) they feel more concern. The books may be good ones but without a big idea (one thinks, for example, of Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital), it’s hard to see them attracting a lot of interest among a general readership or business reader audience.

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As to what’s going on, I’ve heard the view you report expressed by numerous exegetes native to a variety of disciplines (I’m trained in political economy) and with a curious *emotional* force disproportionate to what people have typically actually read. So I reach for a structural explanation. Some of it may just be generational. I was an undergrad during the golden age of poststructuralism in the late 1970s, so I read a lot of continental philosophy and stuff that draws on that makes sense to me. Some of it is a methodological divide, maybe a political one. I’m interested in gender, race, sexual norms, which means I take questions posed around them quite seriously. Others see these as epiphenomenal and/or uninteresting and/or distractions from class, and the divisions over that often get fought out in terms of post’isms. But I don’t mean tendentiously to suggest that’s the whole story.

Re the short list, a few favorite books that approach commerce thoughtfully are:

Billig, Michael. 2002. Barons, Brokers, and Buyers: The Institutions and Cultures of Philippine Sugar. U. Hawaii.

Clark, Gracia. 1994. Onions Are my Husband. Chicago.

Gudeman, Stephen and Alberto Rivera. 1990. Conversations in Colombia: The domestic economy in life and text. Cambridge.

Halperin, Rhoda. 1990. The Livelihood of Kin: Making Ends Meet “The Kentucky Way” Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hefner, Robert W. 1990. The Political Economy of Mountain Java. U. California.

Oxfeld, Ellen. 1993. Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Yanagisako, Sylvia. 2002. Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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That said, let’s try for a moment to put aside the defensiveness and act like anthropologists. Between ckelty’s original post and my quote from Grant McCracken, we have two data points, two examples of what Vic Turner called “native exegesis.” One is a comment from an individual described as the editor of a prestigious university press, the other a comment from someone who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from U. of Chicago, has founded a program on contemporary culture at a major museum and teaches at McGill and Harvard Business School. Their opinions may be outliers, but neither can be dismissed as wholly uninformed.

In my case, I would add a memory of an article that appeared a year or so ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education, where a Harvard University Press editor mentioned that the average sales of a monograph in the humanities and social sciences is around 700 volumes. So the issue may not be confined to anthropology.

Still, the strongest evidence to me is what I encounter every time I return to the States and make a beeline for the nearest Borders or Barnes & Noble to see what’s new on the shelves. For years the anthropology has been mainly what people in my generation see as classics. You can still find Malinowski and Ruth Benedict, Claude Levi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz, but rarely will you find anything by any anthropologist more recent—and, if you do, it will be gone the next time I travel to the States. This, too, may simply reflect that fact that the overwhelming majority of books are, as far as bookstores go, ephemeral—even the bestsellers come and go like mayflies. The disheartening thing is that there is no—at least when I look—accumulation of new classics, no new books by anthropologists that have risen to classic status, books that stay on the shelves year after year.

And when is the last time you saw a book by an anthropologist on the tables at the front of the store, where the stores stock the books that they expect to sell well? (I may have, quite a while ago, seen one of Deborah Tannen’s books, on the argument culture or how men and women talk differently, otherwise I can’t name one.)

These observations don’t, for a moment, make me leap to agree with Grant McCracken’s conclusions any more that it would make me leap to the conclusion that a Taiwanese farmer experiencing what appears to be an epileptic fit is an example of spirit possession (as David Jordan points out, his neighbors may have a lively discussion of whether he is (1) possessed by a god, (2) possessed by a ghost, (3) simply crazy, or (4) faking it—there being material advantages to being recognized as a medium).

They do, however, make me unwilling to sputter, “But…but…but…” and conclude arbitrarily that the man is talking nonsense. I want to know what’s going on.

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Thing is, it’s not difficult to think of work that could be considered tedious in its condemnations of commerce (I’d start with Mauss) or, to pick up on the Steve point on “This Blog Sits…”, overly-reliant on an “oppression/resistance template.” In fact if you follow cultural studiesish work, people have recognized this as a problem for some time.

I guess this is not an argument that really needs making on this blog, but one gets tired of arguments against “cultural studies” or “postmodernism” that take one or two hazily-remembered examples and make them stand for large and variegated literatures.

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