A Google search for Ralph Linton (don’t ask) turned up this remarkably useful site from the AAA: “Materials for Teaching the History of Anthropology”:http://www.aaanet.org/gad/history/index.htm which includes a bunch of free PDFs of obituaries of anthropological greats as well as other articles from the AAA. It’s a great collection of articles and free — and totally obscure. Has anyone else heard of this site? Well gratz to the AAA for putting it together even if they have (as far as I can tell) kept their lanthorn under the web’s bushel. These are great resources for Wikipedians.
In other news our site problems should be over soon. That’s also a long story.
Rex,
This stuff is brilliant. Anyone up for discussing the whole lot, article by article?
John
Funny you mention that. After the discussion surrounding _Village On The Edge_ I contemplated announcing May to be “Worker In The Cane Month” on Savage Minds and have people read it chapter by chapter and comment. Perhaps we should try something like that?
Fine by me, except for one thing: All of the books arrived in Japan just a couple of days ago, and I’ve just finished my first pass through Village On The Edge. I was hoping to continue discussing that book for a while.
Initial thoughts include the following:
1. It’s a great read and does a good job of demonstrating that, in many respects, the residents of Kairiru are people like us. I’m reminded of F.O. (Fred) Gearing’s Face of the Fox.
2. Also on the plus side, it’s a thoughtful exploration of how people address changes in their lives that affect their sense of who they are. Here I’m particularly struck by the fact that discussion of most of the issues the author raises can be found almost daily in Japanese media, where debates over what it is to be Japanese, what Japan should learn from other societies and what Japan has to offer in return are, as they should be, endless.
3. Of particular interest to me is the sensitivity with which the author handles the impact of Catholicism and his own relationships with the priests and catechists he encounters. I say of particular interest because when Ruth and I did our fieldwork in central Taiwan, Cornell anthropologists had already established an ongoing set of relationships with the Maryknoll fathers who were missionizing that part of the island. In Puli, we used the Maryknollers textbooks to study Taiwanese, and we spent quite a few days during our two-year stay in Fr. Clancy Engler’s parsonage, drinking his whiskey, reading his Newsweeks, and discussing Chinese popular religion.
So what’s not to like? Lack of detail.
This is, I am sure, partly a constraint imposed by the publisher. I remember when I wrote my own book being told firmly to keep the number of pages down, since no one was now willing to buy and read massive monographs like those that scholars used to write, let alone assign them in classes. Still, I put Village on the Edge beside my copies of Coral Gardens and Their Magic and The Sexual Life of Savages, and it isn’t just length that’s at stake. The detail in Malinowski’s ethnography, which includes detail that doesn’t necessarily fit very well with the theories he offers, makes the Trobriand corpus a fertile field for reexamination. In contrast, Village on the Edge seems like a lot of more recent work, thoughtful but shallow. Am I being unfair?
Well like I say the book was designed for freshman and could be used for high schoolers as well — its meant to be an overview and not very detailed at all. So it’s a conscious choice he made I wager.
Could be. Does raise interesting questions, though, about the relationship of academic writing to the marketplace. Whatever their flaws, authors like Malinowski or Evans-Pritchard could still envision themselves as writing for the ages, producing encyclopedic accounts that would feed into an ongoing collective project. What does it do to a body of “knowledge” when authors feel pressure to rush into print or, alternatively, to write for freshmen and highschool students, since otherwise their work may simply not be published?
Have you, by the way, read the author’s earlier book? What’s it like?
I’ve started reading Worker in the Cane and am already struck by how Mintz deliberately violates taboos on revealing informant identities, incorporates long stretches of (translated) verbatim text to allow us to hear Don Taso’s own voice, and includes texts transcribed at intervals of several years to stimulate thought about changing perspectives (the conversion to Pentacostalism) and the evolution of trust between the anthropologist and his friend. The photography is also powerful, strongly recalling James Agree and Walker Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
The department that I am about to leave (because I am graduating with master’s degree) had Mintz visit for a lecture. At the “meet the grad students lunch” before the talk, Worker in the Cane came up. In the course of the conversation he mentioned that he set it up so Taso (and now his family) could get royalties every time the book was sold. I got the impression he considered Taso as more of a co-author/colaborator and less of an “informant.”