Target Audience
In my Anthropology of Alternative Economies course I assigned Bill Maurer’s book _Mutual Life, Limited_. I found it puzzling in ways that I find a lot of contemporary anthropological writing puzzling, which is why I am blogging about it here. Now, this probably reads as the set-up for a long rant about “postmodernism” that will end in my shaking my tatty black umbrella in the general direction of all perfidious young uns, set to an encomium of sympathetic yowls from the horde of cats circling my ankles. But that is not really what I intend here, and it’s none of your business how I spend my weekends anyway.
What I found puzzling about ML,L is that I couldn’t really figure out to what audience it was directed. Or perhaps what I mean is that I couldn’t figure out why it seemed NOT to be directed at… say….. me and my students: a reasonably clever bunch of readers interested in its evidence and prepared to be sympathetic to its analysis. In the introduction, Maurer invokes Leenhardt as a kind of titular deity for his undertaking; he even says (or I think this is what he says) that if the discipline of anthropology were to emulate the kind of scholarship carried out by Leenhardt more faithfully “we just might discover what anthropology would have been becoming all along”. Now, I have to admit that I am not at all sure what this means, or if it is possible, really, to parse what it means. But I am guessing that it means something like, “yay classic Leenhardt, pfaugh anthropology as it has for the most part actually unfolded”. It’s an odd choice of opening flourish, as the text that follows bears very little resemblance to the fine-grained old-fashioned ethnography of _Do Kamo_. In fact ML,L takes bits of different ethnographic cases to make a broad argument about whether “alternative” systems of exchange value can somehow stand against the universalizing value-system of modern money or whether even the attempt to make them do so serves only to reinforce the hegemonic status of the latter. He relates this to the task of anthropology itself — does our interpretive work demonstrate that “other worlds are possible” or does it just help to translate everything into the world from which anthropology itself has sprung (eg, Western, naughty, capitalist)? It’s an interesting problem, but also, it seems to me, one that would be utterly unaddressable in a Do Kamo like format.
Anyway, then, unless I have it all wrong it’s a hedgehog sort of a book, but one that spends a lot of time acting foxy: thick with references to theories and bodies of work the precise relationship of which to the matter at hand remains under-articulated, bits of information about everything from Bretton Woods to Bartleby the Scrivener, and — in the most emblematic instance — featuring the reproduction of a “magic square” (p. 118) with no textual explanation whatsoever of what a magic square is, how one might construct one, and what is cool about them (I had to look it up on the internet, and they are pretty neat — it would have been NICE if that bit of work had been done in the text itself, though). Maybe everybody else reads everything, doesn’t need indicators of relevance, and whiled away their childhood summers doing math puzzlers and so magic squares are as mother’s milk to them. But I must say I found it rawther clubbish and ended up feeling guilty for making my students purchase the book as a required text for the course.
Interestingly, Maurer favorably references another book that has, in my view, a very similar feel: Hugh Raffles’ _In Amazonia_. As far as I could tell, that was another hedgehogger: its one big idea was that what we think of as pristine nature is usually anthropogenic, exhibit A being Amazonia. Again, quite a creditable point. But I wondered as I read the book if it was _utterly_ necessary for me to bash my way through quite so many weeble-wobbles of prolix prose to arrive at it. I haven’t got _In Amazonia_ in front of me but I do remember very clearly that it winds up with a hootingly portentious (or what I like to think of as a “cue the music”) last line. But whatever it was, it couldn’t beat Maurer’s, which trots out angels and God in a scenery-chewing finale.
Okay, so maybe this is just a question of “for those of you who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like”. But I wonder — who DOES like this sort of thing? And I wonder it with feverish intensity as both Raffles’ and Maurer’s books are prize winning despite being — in my big fat self-important opinion — intelligent, interesting, and substantative and yet stylistically incredibly off-putting. So, to formulate this as a question: what, or who, _is_ their target audience?
I have to admit that this is a book I’m perpetually in the middle of, so perhaps I’ll have a different view of it when I get to the scenery-chewing finale. A couple of things struck me about it:
First, it is not just dense, it’s SHORT. I would readily read a longer, less dense version of it.
A lot of the book’s interest, for me at least and possibly others, is the way that it attempts to address a lot of concerns at points where epistemology and rhetoric join together — there’s now a long list of ways of naming things, writing about them, assuming epistemic authority, etc. etc. that many feel are problematic. I felt ML,L did a superb job of producing a text that scrupulously (perhaps obsessively) avoided things that Weren’t To Be Done.
At the end, though, I lost the forest for the trees. I had a sense of the moves that anthropology should make, but lost track of why we were making them — what the disciplinary goals were. Why should we or anyone else take us seriously if all we do is ‘ride along side’?
I am always ready to stand up for difficult prose when it is necesasry, and there is a certain elegance to some ‘difficult’ authors (Levi-Strauss’s verbal acrobatics, for instance). But some seem to think the prose in ML,L and other works like it is actually aesthetically pleasing. I think of Riles’s “Network Inside Out” here, which takes an intriguing point and an interesting fieldsite and buries it under punishingly and deliberately opaque prose. This is more than bullshitting or obscurantism — it’s a stylistic choice I don’t understand. Perhaps this is what happens when you expose impressionable young things Deleuze and Strathern at an early age?
Report this comment
Ozma, I remember wondering how your students would cope with Maurer’s book when you first posted the course outline. So thanks for posting this.
In terms of the aesthetic of his writing style I think you can trace a loose (comedic) lineage:
First you have Rilke:
“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive”
Which is nice. And intelligible. But then we have Heidegger the Poet, plodding about in imitation:
“The jug presences as a thing. The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things. Thinging gathers. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers the fourfold’s stay, its while, into something that stays for a while: into this thing, that thing.”
In academia the tradition beings thereabouts. So we have Deleuze and Guattari and others. Bourdieu too springs to mind:
“structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures”
And so we end up with Maurer:
“Circulating reference’s reference to circulation allows the abstraction and stabilization of circulation itself as a new problematic.”
I can see the attraction of this stuff – I loved Rilke as much as Pynchon when I was in my early 20s. And knowing the above quotes probably means I have absorbed the academic horror versions to some extent. But for the most part any academic attempt at this kind of word play comes across as thunderously dull and portentious. I think anyone who has written a phd knows the temptation to wax lyrical – but I am not sure finding poertry in finance really helps the reader that much.
Report this comment
Rex — yeah, Riles’s work also seems to be in that same charmed circle that I just don’t get. Although I have to admit I haven’t read her book, I did get partially through one of her articles (I think in AE?) and honestly it made me feel sort of sad. Like sad in that same “you’re not invited to this party” sort of way, in that I felt like the writing being used was signalling something to someone who was definitely not me.
Tim — ah, well, yes. One thing about being a novice prof is that you are very often willy-nilly springing things on your students that you have not yet read yourself (or at least that’s how I do it!). So I really did appreciate, for example, your recommendation of Congo-Paris which was quite teachable vs. Mutual Life, Limited which was only intermittently teachable. But I don’t know about just finding the “comedic” value in various incarnations of academic writing: for example, the Bourdieu phrase you cite as comic I actually think is rather elegant, by which I mean that I’m willing to believe that all of this stuff strikes some people as jazzy and right on. I just wonder, how many of those people are there out there, and why do they seem so firmly to have the upper hand in the discipline?
Report this comment
The question you must always ask of yourself as a writer in these situtations: are you using chiasmus, or is chiasmus using you?
Report this comment
Tim you make me so sad — Heidegger is a wonderful writer! But it’s true that it doesn’t work in English the way it does in German. And it’s also true that he spawned a lot of unimpressive imitators.
It’s clear in the case of Network Inside Out that Riles was heavily influenced by Munn and Strathern, who are both fantastically talented people. However even the most charitable has issues with their style, and their work is sui generis — no one can (or should) do Munn or Strathern except Munn and Strathern.
We should ask Riles or Maurer to explain themselves publically here on SM, but I really think that they think they are just laying down mind-blowing and impressive prose.
Report this comment
comet jo you are funny. :)
Report this comment
There is a fantasy that I think it is easy to entertain in the social sciences: that there is a “standard” or “conventional” style of work which is unpretentious, careful and rigorous, free of jargon and which very clearly states its central argument, and guides readers through the occasionally facinating and hard-won details that support it. In reality, such works are extremely hard to find, and are usually justly rewarded when they do appear. Instead, the standard work is more likely to be one of an extremely heterogenous mix of styles, not quite certain of the central argument, relying on data that should be more interesting than it is made to be and filled with references to an inner circle of closest known research comrades. It is not our fault when we produce work like this, it’s just not as great as it could be. I like Bill’s book a great deal, but I don’t think it quite makes it to that level also. The fact that it is award winning may testify to the inner-circle theory (for the conspiracy theorists out there), but more likely reflects the innovation employed in its conceptualization of a theoretical and empircal field: the comparison of alternative economies, the research and desription of Islamic finance, and the development of the concept of lateralization. Now, it kind of sucks that since one of the main themes of the book is that anthropologists cannot simply and straightforwardly describe, for instance, alternative economies such as Islamic Finace, there is no simple and straighforward description of Islamic Finance in the book– this accounts for the extra work it is making us all do. Nonetheless, that approach is balanced by a lot of interesting detail throughout the book that does in fact give insight into alternative economies. But I’m not sure asking who the target audience is good practice, academically (it’s great practice in terms of “public” anthropology, or marketing of our mixed messages)– I think it matters more whether anyone can do anything with the book… which remains to be seen.
Report this comment
Maybe if Gell were alive he could draw us some Maurerograms to complement the Strathernograms. In terms of the latter Gell wrote that at first he thought he could make Gender of the Gift easier to comprehend by cutting the end off of each sentence and then attaching it to the start of the next to form a new sentence that conveyed a single idea. But then he changed his mind and thought that the writing was difficult to understand because the ideas were difficult. Now perhaps on the one hand it is the latter perceived correlation that perpetuates imitations of ‘difficult writing’ in academia, and also the opinion that much of those imitations are just a prose pose. But it is also true that you can’t separate Strathern or Munn or Heidegger or whoever from their writing – it is part of the way they think, and oftentimes we are watching writers grapple towards something. On the other, other hand, rhetorical flourishes, chiasme etc. says “I know it all so well I have time to put in some frilly bits!” It’s the difference between people thinking you are clever because you can ride a unicycle, and then showing off by juggling while riding a unicycle. And as ckelty indicates, the tricksy words are also part of the argument: “poetically Man dwells” says Heidgegger. So Rex and Ozma I think you are both right that writers such as Maurer do think they are writing jazzy, right-on, mind-blowing prose, and suppose I would add that their motivations are tied to theoretical ideas about rhetoric and (possibly) subconscious ideas about how it is received.
Which brings me to Rex’s point about translation (don’t be sad, I love that quote! but I also know why there is an industry dedicated to writing books explaning his work, from Dreyfus on). All of the quotes in my lineage (which was itself comedic, not the quotes in it) are translations, except for the one from ML,L. And leaving aside whatever gets muddled in the retelling, I think there is something important that happens when English speakers imitate the writing style of French and German philosophers. There is a difference in the way we accept rhetoric or portentious prose. What they read as intellectual artistry we read as po-faced twaddle. I don’t know why. Maybe someone who is more linguistically able, or rhetorically schooled, does. But when someone from the UK or US writes like a translated German then you know they are just asking for it from plebs like us!
Rex, I do think we should ask Maurer to tell us about his writing on SM. You go first.
Report this comment
CKelty wrote “In reality, such works are extremely hard to find, and are usually justly rewarded when they do appear.”
Good point, and another opportunity to recognize the genius of David Hume! But, at the same time, I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t something about Hume’s ideas which gave his writing such clarity. No deep hidden structuring structures here…
Report this comment
YESSSS! someone (I’m looking at you, Tim) can finally explain to me what “po-faced” means. I love the phrase but am never quite sure what it indicates.
Report this comment
Chris — whether or not it is “good practice”, I find I actually wonder about the target audience question a lot. And I don’t wonder about it in a “everything that doesn’t serve an immediately realizable purpose is CRAP” way, I wonder about it in a way that has to do with thinking of scholarship as a sociable activity. something that often gets left out of discussions of how difficult Heidegger, or Strathern, or Munn, or [insert name here] are is the fact that huge numbers of people read all of them. Ergo, the difficulty of their writing doesn’t preclude it being inviting, & one might even say enormously so.
The difference that I felt was that Maurer’s writing (and Raffles’s, and Riles’s, and even your own refusal to tell anybody what you meant by “desire as lack” as the definining principle of anthropology here a few weeks ago) was that I felt many moves were made in it to push readers away. You don’t know exactly how I am using Poovey? You don’t know what a magic square is? You find my willfully peculiar shifting about of verb tenses totally opaque? Move along, then.
It’s not “difficulty” or even dense referentiality that gets me (Sahlins’s lovely writing is always full of pointy-headed jokes, for example). It’s more a feeling I get — and I’ll concede it could be a wrong, “conspiracy theorist”, tinfoil chapeu feeling — that very little effort is being made to include the reader in and a fair amount of effort is being made to signal that certain kinds of readers (such as my puzzled self) are being warded off. I don’t GET that as an approach to scholarship.
Report this comment
I think that Ozma is right on this and Chris isn’t going to be able to make his position work. We’re not asking people to write conventionally, we’re asking them to write well — something that covers a variety of styles. And yes, it is hard to do — but so what? Being a professor and writing good work is hard! That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t expect people to do it.
The idea that you can beg off speculating about the intended audience of a text also doesn’t fly with me. Many literary critics would say that all texts have an implied reader (Booth), summon up a public (Warner), or are situated in a world of already spoken utterances (Bakhtin) or a past ‘natural history’ of texts (Silverstein and Urban, etc. etc.). Anyone who has written has surely had the experiences of worrying about who will read their work — whether its because they’ve pitched the book a certain way to their publisher, or because they are aiming for certain colleagues. Even worrying about the fact that you don’t know who its for a way of worrying about your books audience. So this is a perfectly natural question for Ozma to ask — and for us to believe Maurer et. al have thought about.
I think there is still a point about style in Tim’s comments that I’m not really sure about. Imitating translations of a foreign style naturally can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how well the translation works in the destination language. Imitating a _poor_ translation is reckless practice.
Report this comment
well, if you don’t like my desire-as-lack, wait till I dust off my
Derridada and let loose a powerful barage of il n’y a pas d’hors du text.
E.B. White: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a
frog, nobody learns anything and the frog dies of it.”
Report this comment
Rex, I’m not really commenting on the badness or goodness of imitating translated writers per se – more about the way that is received (depending on who is being imitated). So even if I did a fantastic natural imitation of the best Heidegger translation, in a contemporary English-language context I think people would probably snigger, because of all sorts of (cultural?) reasons. When we read Heidegger we think OK so he is German, writing in 1927 (or 1954), part of the Romantic revival, believed deeply in poetry as art and philosophy and a way of life…etc. So we appreciate it, even though it is hard going and may become frustrating with lengthy exposure. Now maybe this is the same point you made about Munn and Strathern being sui generis. But I think there is something else to do with the role and style of intellectuals in continental Europe that is different. Maybe in the English speaking tradition we just like to keep art and academia more separate – we are suspicious of language which willfully draws attention to itself in that context. It is seen in the old predjudice held by UK/US/Australian philosophers against their continental counterparts – scientism versus humanism – where any kind of aestheticised or historicised philosophy was frowned upon. Now as it happens the continental variety is a lot more useful for anthropology than the English ‘native’ forms, because of the historicism, because of the denial of objectivity…but we are met with a conundrum if we wish to imitate or be influenced by its style because of ideas about writing. Some are able to make the transition well – look at Alfred Gell, he read Heidegger and was heavily influenced by Merleau-Ponty, but the clarity of his writing is seen as impeccable. Or in literature: Kerouac admired Sartre, but I enjoyed On the Road a hell of a lot more than the translation of Nausea! Maybe that’s a bad example.
Anyway I think I am starting to wander off-topic…
Report this comment