Off-, Neo-, Anti-, Post-, Pre-, Quasi-, Oxy-, et al.: Another Pop Quiz

‘Pop Quiz’: Occasional series in geeky anthropological fun. The Boym quote below (and Rex’s comment) inspired me to look up the following. Any guesses as to its author?

Neo1 Neo2

12 thoughts on “Off-, Neo-, Anti-, Post-, Pre-, Quasi-, Oxy-, et al.: Another Pop Quiz

  1. I suspect Strong may appreciate a certain irony in Rex’s implicit typology – early and late Boon?

    Overwritten? There’s a big difference between a) (very) challenging/virtuoso; and b) overwritten.

  2. See you and raise you one:

    bq. Advanced anti-communism trades places with the enemy. It becomes opposite-communism, and “opposites” are things alike in every respect save one. The final stages of American dissolution in Vietnam will be marked by imitation of the enemy’s techniques. I have heard it foreshadowed in the talk of Saigon’s officialdom: _discipline_, a senior American civilian officer told me, is what the South Vietnamese government needs; _power_, he said, is the only thing the Chinese can understand; _history_, he said, will prove us right. In a remote provincial outpost I found two Americans who had appropriated as their own draconian Chinese methods of interrogation and indoctrination (“motivation”) is the American newspeak). The forced destruction of people’s beliefs is no longer properly describes as something “they” do. Tortuously exacted confession and conversion are no longer things we fight against: they are now part of our own arsenal, weapons of out own struggle.

  3. There is a difference between a) challenging and b) overwritten. That’s why I describe authors like Nancy Munn’s oeuvre as ‘challenging’ and (much of) Jim Boon’s work as ‘overwritten’. There is also such a thing as c) ‘virtuoso’ writing, but too often C is just the self-congratulatory term that people use to describe their own B-style work. A quick comparison of Comet Jo’s quote from Sahlins should be enough to demonstrate that the proof is in the pudding.

  4. Rex has it. I’ll have to see what I can think of by way of a prize. The quote is from “The Destruction of Conscience in Vietnam” (p. 249), reprinted in _Culture in Practice_. Thought I would throw it into this thread because it is a piece of analysis (and writing) that I think deserves more attention than it gets. Though I agree with Rex, to me it helps make the point about the difference between virtuoso writing and something that is overwritten. Speaking of which, I’d be interested in hearing any of the Savage Minds poster’s thoughts on whether _Pan’s Labyrinth_ is the cinematic equivalent of “b” or “c’.

  5. I think we should give awards only for instances where you can’t google search for passages — too easy to get the answer. I, of course, picked up the source of that last piece immediately…. 😉

  6. Ahhh… There are so many ways to cheat! I strongly suspect however that Christopher actually knew the source.

    Regarding awards. When I am rich and famous, I will endow a fellowship for anthropologists. But I intend this fellowship to be used for one exclusive purpose: shopping! It\’ll be a shopping fellowhip.

    Over-written? That sounds pejorative. 🙂 Boon\’s writing is over the top for sure (extra-vagant even), but I think that in part stems from a writing disability. I seem to recall him saying somehwere that he is congenitally unable not to alliterate. What I admire a lot about Boon\’s stuff is that his work embodies or enacts the principles of culture(s) that it also describes: culture(s) as above all exuberant, exagerrated, over-done, eccentric, and, especially, composed of always already \’read\’ texts. So if Boon is on occasion wordy, sometimes he\’s the opposite: see the very very long passages of other authors he cites almost always. This is not Boon writing, but Boon reading, or, more precisely, re-reading. (The notion of re-reading is key.)

    One of the keenest takes on Boon is John Kelly\’s review of \’Verging On\’ from History of Religions {Vol. 41, No. 1 (Aug., 2001), pp. 78-81.} Highly recommended for those who may wonder what the underlying gist is.

  7. It seems to me we shouldn’t confuse the actual language of a piece of writing with the concepts that writing contains. IMHO, neither challenging nor overwritten language can be called virtuoso writing, no matter how good the idea. Virtuoso writing means that the language used to express a concept is as elegant as the concept itself.

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