“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?

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!!!

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.

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.

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.

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)?