Anthropology in book stores
Here is something I’ve wanted to blog about for some time now but never been able to find the time: anthropology in book stores.
If you go to Borders or even Barnes and Noble, you can visit the ‘Philosophy’ section and buy books of staggering degrees of specialization. Not just Nietzsche and Sartre, but Kripke and Quine as well. And Deleuze. What on earth are these book stores doing stocking such specialist items? Is it that the reading public has a weakness for continental philosophy? Is it that analytic philosophy is done in articles rather than monographs, so they keep only the continental in stock? Are these books merely decoration to entice self-styled ‘high brows’ into the store so that they can browse Kant but purchase Adorable Puppies Calendars?
Whatever the reason, those books are on the shelves. But what about social sciences? And what about anthropology? In my experience chain book stores do not stock social sciences according to discipline. Rather they stock them according to subject — a section on sexuality, a section on African Americans and so forth. The anthropology section is either labeled “Sociology/Anthropology” or “Anthropology/Archaeology” depending on whether the paradigm is Freakonomics or Indiana Jones. And often, of course, there is no anthropology section — there is simply ‘cultural studies’ or (as I saw recently in Australia) “cultural/critical studies.”
What does this say about the reading public’s perception of our discipline? Obviously its understandable that book store sections are broken into topics (Jews, Queer studies, etc.) rather than approaches (sociology, anthropology). But somehow there isn’t the sense that someone would want to read anthropologists for the same reason that they read philosophy — that the discipline has something Big and Important to say. Or what do you think….?
“Are these books merely decoration to entice self-styled ‘high brows’ into the store so that they can browse Kant but purchase Adorable Puppies Calendars?”
Yes.
My closest friend from college is the national sales director for a major publisher, and he tells me that one factor influencing the selection in the big chains is the fact that so many publishers sales reps are former philosophy and English Lit majors.
I think the cont. phil. also is there to help “intellectual” dudes pick up chicks in the in-store coffee bar. This claim is, of course, based on actual field research (by which I mean many months of reading expensive european fashion and design magazines–without buying them–while drinking a cup of tea at the Borders Cafe (note that tea is the cheapest item on the menu). I cannot tell you how many young, earnest, and varyingly attractive young men who are by no means professional academics seem to have read Kant, or, more punk, Guy DeBord, or, perhaps more rarely, Hakim Bey. Odd, but strangely true.
I don’t know if anthropology has the same appeal to young counter-culturalists as does the cover of anything claiming to critique pure reason. Maybe _Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology_? Unclear.
But seriously, philosophy is not just for the comp. lit. crowd. You should see the dusty and torn copies of various French philosophers that unemployed types are reading here in Dakar!
Before I became an editor, I worked for a couple of years as a sales representative for Princeton, California, and Blackwell going to bookstores in New England and New York (upstate and the city down to 48th Street). Since I had come from nine years doing the front table displays at the Seminary Coop Bookstore at the University of Chicago (and hanging around the anthro department) I expected to be able to sell a lot of anthropology, if not in Vermont, at least in Cambridge, MA or Ithaca. Not. I would patiently explain to buyers how the questions being addressed were the similar to the ones in the lit theory books they would buy; or tell them how the same book might sell ten or fifteen copies at the Seminary Coop. All to little avail.
Eventually I had to see that each person’s bookstore was their project; even if I knew people in (say) New Haven that I was sure would buy the book, that didn’t make it incumbent on the bookstore to carry it. I thought about individualism and the resistance to cultural explanation; the inability of Americans to imagine that something about Fiji could be about them, etc.
This was all around 1990. Now things have changed in complex ways. First, we no longer have a bookstore centered culture. I call the present post-bookstore; there are a number of good ones left, but a small, count on two hands number. The percentage of an academic book, even if by the kind of capital T theorists hailed above, that goes out immediately to bookstores is far smaller in absolute and percentage terms than anytime I can remember. Amazon and other on-line sales are far more important, and diffusion — getting the word out about a book is far slower. It’s more democratic — the person at Boise State can buy the same books as the person in Ann Arbor, but in a way that produces a different practice and yields different results.
I think the loss of the visual encounter space of a bookstore is huge. Lots of crossover between disciplines happened that way because there was no need to know what one was looking for in advance. Go in for Durkheim, come out with some cool looking book by a junior person in another field that you otherwise would never have heard of. Great for collections too (what is all this Agamben stuff about? maybe something in here will help me?). Amazon is great when you hear there is a new book by Chris Kelty (coming soon) or Lisa Rofel, but one is less likely to find someone outside one’s normal paths.
This has been very bad for literature scholars, where the crossover from bookstores once compensated for the books not being taught so much (big theory yes, but not what scholars write for tenure). Anthropologists (and historians) teach books produced from the discipline, so this time is great for us as far as publishing goes.
However, the irony is that now there is much more anthropology on topics that would have worked in bookstores. All the developments of anthropology of media, sexualities, diasporas, race, globalization, neo-liberalism (okay, a lot of the Duke list) would have been terrific in the bookstores of the late 80s. But now the infrastructure is no longer there.
There is more to this story, of course (like about changes within chains) but hopefully this little bit helps. I gave a talk last week where I pointed out that in a lot of future of scholarly communication venues the book is held as if it were the unchanged form, where in both cultural and material ways, I think its been shifting a huge amount.
Ken
What’s a “book store”?
Seriously. I concur with Ken, things have shifted a HUGE amount. When I was a grad student, I worked at the MIT Press Bookstore in Cambridge MA (and Waterstone’s in the old Spiritualist building, before it burnt for like the 11th time, ending my job). That was the single greatest advance in my scholarly career–I literally would not be an academic but for that job. So much surprising stuff when one spends one’s break in the Arts section one day, the computer science section the next, and the psychology section the day after that. It felt like one of a small number of centers of the world.
Now I live in a city that literally has no bookstore with scholarly books. I’m serious, not even the hip lit crit books. Houston has one small elite university and one great big commuter school, and no bookstores of note. There are a few random finds in a used bookstore here and there, and two really good art and architecture stores (Brazos Bookstore and the Menil Museum store)… but I would never expect to find my book in a bookstore in Houston. I fear the same is true throughout much of the US today.
On the flipside, I never find new scholarly work online–certainly not Amazon which is constantly trying to sell me crap that I apparently share an interest in with other people. If I’m lucky I find it in the TLS, the NYRB or the NYT Book Review, or in the various catalogs that come my way haphazardly and occasionally.
I hear about new anthropology here, believe it or not. And a few other blogs and when I talk to my colleagues… other than that, I could very easily never hear about 90% of the work published in fields other than the ones extremely close to my own…