Last semester one of the strategies I unconsciously use to read crystallized in my mind when I discovered the concept of ‘pace-layering’ in Peter Morville’s book Ambient Findability. Morville gets the idea from Stewart Brand who (according to Morville) emphasizes that way that different ‘layers’ of things move at different speeds. In the case of a building, for instance, the stuff within it may change daily, while the site it’s located on changes in the longue duree of geological time and paint, building, and furniture all run on a clock that is somewhere in between (think Braudel here folks). Morville was interested in using this concept to resolve the debate (which now seems decades old) between advocates of folksonomies and more traditional library cataloging methods. Folksonomies are good for building connections between content quickly, he says, while the structured taxonomies of catalogers work better but take longer. It’s an ingenious resolution to the problem.
When it comes to being a scholar I find the concept of ‘pace-layering’ to be a useful way to imagine how academics discover, read, and archive information (‘books). Too often we tend to dichotomize our reading practices into ‘real reading’ and skimming. Even when we recognize the difference between different degrees of reading, we tend to stigmatize reading practices along the same continuum, with all other sorts of readings compromised forms of ‘real reading’ rather than just ‘different’ forms of reading. Some people — but not all! — would say that real reading is rereading. These are the people who read Plato year after year after year and claim that they ‘really started to understand it’ after the first decade or so of rereading.
I personally totally embrace pace layering. At times I am ‘on top’ of things in a ‘boing boing’ or ‘slashdot’ kind of way — scanning hundreds of RSS feeds to see which ‘imprint’ on my attention, browsing through tables of contents of journals, and immersing myself in ephemera and quick scans. Sometimes I only have an hour to ‘spend with a book’ or (more often) only want an hour’s worth of understanding of a book. At book stores I judge books by their covers (an important professionalization skill, and Strong points out).
At other times I believe in being ‘on the bottom’ of things. This is particularly true of stuff in my research speciality. There is no substitute for a close read of work that you really consider to be central to your research project. A serious encounter with Levinas requires serious amounts of time.
That said, imagining reading in terms of pace-layering helps bring some reflexivity to the research process. For instance, you might say: “screw it, I’m reading Levinas for beginners — I don’t want to have a deep engagement with Levinas at the moment.” Part of pace layering is understanding how your diet of information is tied in with your intellectual project, and what your priorities are.
So although we tend to think of skimming a book or article as a ‘wrong way’ of reading it that we engage in because we don’t have enough time or energy to give it the close read ‘that we really should.’ But if we conceive of research as a series of different ‘paces’ of attention, then we can see that each has its own unique advantages and drawbacks and we can then work to maximize the potentialities of each of them. For instance, I encourage my grad students that if they are going to browse they should REALLY BROWSE.
The question that Chris’s recent post brings to my mind, then is not ‘how do I arrange my own information diet as a scholar’ but rather ‘what sort of information ecology am I going to force on my students?’
Teaching faster research methods is a necessity — scholars use them, they are worthwhile, and there are things about scholarly fashion that are simply part of a scholar’s craft that you won’t get anywhere else. In our graduate program we convey these skills to students through informal presentations to our fabulous graduate student union and a class on professionalization. In the theory course in the spring I plan to teach not just Great Articles Of The Past but editorials and tables of contents for journals founded at key moments (Cultural Anthropology, Public Culture, and Dialectical Anthropology). Just looking over, say, the first five years of tables of contents for a journal can tell you a lot about the ‘history of theory’.
But only up to a point. I think that these faster paced layers of research constitute (as Durkheim might put it) the secular scaffolding around which the more ‘sacred’ competencies of our discipline is built. And these are sacred to me: close, careful reading of material provides an intellectual experience for which there is no substitute. Moreover, we in the university are really the only people nit-picky enough to fetishize the sort of thorough comportment that these close readings demand. Students will spend the rest of their life working at faster paces of research and by the time we get them they already have been using them for quite some time — most reading people are exposed to requires these sort of competencies.
I think the in-depth and careful analysis of material — particularly ethnographic material — should be at the heart of our teaching. It isn’t always possible, but it is important, and it is always worth trying to make time for. This sort of skill makes one more employable and — more importantly — makes one more human. It is, in my opinion, one of the repertoire of skills that increases people’s capacity to be more themselves — whoever those future people may be.
Too often education is a pass through in which a student who is already working in retail rushes through a BA, learning very little, and gaining enough skills to consign them to retail for the rest of their career. Too often we cram content down grad students throats, teaching them little more than the fact that their decision to pursue a career in the academy was a mistake. We tell ourselves that cramming and skimming is inevitable so they might as well take it, good and hard. This approach entails an abandonment of one of the fundamental things that a good teacher needs lots of: hope. Hope that you are helping your students (even if, as a social scientist, you know the odds are they are Destined For Retail) is central to teaching and — maybe — helping students buck the trends.
So the question for me is not whether different paces of research have a place. They obviously do. The question is what sort of unique contribution our teaching can make. And although there are ways in which we can provide high-level skimming skills I really think that what we do, at our core, is teach students the very valuable skill of being ‘on the bottom’ of social life. I recognize that this is a topic on which rational people can differ, but it is not one that anyone is going to get me to change my mind on any time soon.
Kelty, Strong, and now Rex, what a great series of provocative posts. I can see a book in the offing: Surviving, Thriving and Actually Learning Something: A Graduate Student’s Guide to the Nuts and Bolts of Academic Life.
From a slightly different angle, however, I wonder if we have thought deeply enough about the social and cognitive structures of academic life and the predicament in which we now find ourselves–where no one ever gets to read more than a miniscule fraction of the things that we could or ought to read.
I recall vividly a conversation with the late Jack Roberts, one of my profs at Cornell, in which he remarked that there was a time when all the members of the American Anthropological Association could meet in a ranch house outside Tucson. It was then possible for an aspiring anthropologist to read everything there was to read and keep up with developments in all four fields. By the 1960s, the proliferation of journals and new books was already making this impossible.
But if people can’t read everything, what should they read? The classical model is one in which, while nobody reads everything, everybody reads a few things that everybody has read. Thus, for example (I quote from something I wrote about traditional Chinese religion),
“China is the world’s oldest continuously literate society, and the sheer volume of historical texts is enormous. One source suggests that the 25 imperial histories alone would require 45 million words in English translation. In Chinese the Buddhist Canon is 74 times the length of the Christian bible, while the Daoist Canon is a library that runs to several thousand pages in its latest edition.”
All this material was, however, a single, vast sprawling network centered on the Four Books and Five Classics, Tang lyrics, a handful of Neo-Confucian commentaries, the Lotus Sutra, the Dao-de-jing, and a few other texts that every self-respecting scholar was familiar with. Allusions at the fringes of the network still evoked these central texts.
In contrast, anthropology and, more broadly, academia today, is a network fragmented into numerous isolated components that continue to fission through schismogenic processes as new generations seek to position themselves in competition for attention, prestige and support. (Anthony Abbott’s Chaos of Disciplines is, for my money, a great stab at describing and explaining these processes.)
Is it even remotely possible to point people to a series of texts and say to them, read these and you will know what’s going on (outside, that is, the particular academic lineage/faction to which their professor belongs)?
Why would we teach them what people outside our faction think?
I initially read this as “_pace_ layering,” which mystified me for a few seconds. “With apologies to ‘layering’?” Or was this about nested deferences to other authors, which this post does a little bit in responding to Kelty and Strong […_pace_ Strong’s “_pace_ Kelty”]?
But yes. We live in inflationary times as information goes. It’s really too much. There’s too damn much of it. This has impacted my ‘Ethnographic Analysis’ course, which I am presently teaching, in the following way:
We are reading ONE book for ONE semester, VERY carefully, and writing a lot about it. The book is Bashkow’s “The Meaning of Whitemen.” Fortunately, given the richness of the ethnography, the robustness of the analytical apparatus, and the topicality of the research question (race & modernity), the book is actually able to withstand such scrutiny and in fact merits it. I’m thinking of this along the lines of that Social Anthropology we (Rex and I) took once, in which we read one book (Division of Labor in Society) for basically a whole semester. Those were good times.
Ok ok I was just kidding about the whole faction thing.
Actually, I think what John is presenting as a problem is in fact simply the normal state of affairs: there will always be more to read than you ever can and every choice is partial and situated. The solution? Do the best you can to make hard decisions and hope that you don’t end up regretting them. Everything, after all, is impermanent. You expected something else?
Just to pull a bit of the subtext of this entry out, I’m advocating a position in which the goal is to teach students how to learn, not to teach students a particular set of contents or a cannon. So as far as I am concerned it is not WHAT you read, but HOW you learn to read it.
John since you seem so enamored of Chicago sociologists (but please note it is ‘Andrew’, not ‘Anthony’ Abbott) can I suggest the works of Donald Levine? His _Visions of the Sociological Tradition_ and _Powers of Mind_ are both doubleplusgood and deal with many of the issues that you raise here. Although, to be fair, _Powers_ requires the reader to really care about the history of curricular reform in the college at UofC. Some shorter pieces of his (like the ones on the role of martial arts in the liberal arts) are available online Free as well.
actually, reading “everything in the field” is just an issue of scale– like measuring the coastline of england in inches or in miles. I can in fact read everything that has been written in the anthropology of free and open source software. And I’m pretty sure I’ve read a very large portion of the anthropology of science and technology… and so on. Anthropologists of professor Roberts generation might have read all of anthropology, but I doubt it, and certainly not all of neighboring fields.
Regardless, I think its actually more interesting that people can develop a pretty good sense of as many different research directions and fields as they do, and that as a social process, anthropology as a discipline stilll pretty robustly moves research in identifiable directions.
Except of course strong’s class, which is only reading one book.
While anthropology used to be small sociologically, these dreams of ‘reading everything’ in the field seem a bit bizarre to me. Like _all_ of Boas’s Kwakiutl ethnography and _all_ of the Golden Bough and _all_ of the BOE volumes? I reckon Certified Anthropologists had produced a lifetimes worth of reading by the mid-20s.
And what sort of normative theories are being snuck in when we assume disciplines are better small, sparse, and hermetically sealed? BRING ON THE ASSEMBLAGES BABY!!!
It’s a course on *analysis* which I think requires careful reading, writing, re-reading, improvisation, inspiration, re-reading again, editing, criticism, more writing, and so on. It needs to be deliberative and reflexive, and hopping and skipping across the contours of whatever assemblage ™ happens to be emergent ™ right now might not help _students_ figure out HOW to DO anthropology and write ethnography, which takes practice. I think. So. We are reading this one very rich monograph, reading around in associated literature a *little* bit (e.g., debates between neo-Boasians and Fergusonians on what the units/objects of ethnographic attention ought to be, plus accounts of fieldwork, but not too much because our focus is writing), and WRITING a lot. The students read and comment on each other’s analyses, etc. This is because it’s a methods course in analysis.
Rex writes,
“Actually, I think what John is presenting as a problem is in fact simply the normal state of affairs: there will always be more to read than you ever can and every choice is partial and situated.”
John replies. Having too much too read is certainly the normal state of affairs. You did, I trust, notice the Chinese example to which I pointed. There is, however, a significant difference between choices that are partial and situated within a network of texts that is one big, hierarchically organized component and choices that are partial and situated within a growing proliferation of multiple components with no connections between them. The fate of those trapped in the smaller components of a fragmented network is diminished opportunity, influence and support. Doesn’t this sound a bit too familiar?
I’m sorry John, I lost you with all the network stuff and fragmentation stuff — what are you alluding to there?