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For grad students who are reading copiously already, I would advise keeping a journal of personal reactions to the readings. Are there pet peeves with writers, especially those who represent the “flavor” of the moment? Write them down in detail. Graduate school is a socialization process, a rite de passage, and the outcome is a certain sameness–even in the debates of the moment. The “naivete” and “immaturity” that are criticized by one’s faculty may hold the germs of insight that can be developed through a career. (And some will not, of course.) At no other time in one’s career will one’s readings be as fresh as at this point. Use this wisely.

I can’t begin to advise my peers, who are no doubt far more accomplished than I am. What I can do is share what I find important: two sorts of readings. First, I try to read daily in the language of the culture that I am studying. I can’t do the second daily, but over breaks and on weekends, I try to read books and articles related to the region I study and that are outside the discpline: history, political science, economics, the arts. Anthropological writing can be weak in its work in relation to these disciplines. For example, an historian who recommended I read Hornberg and Lees, as well as Braudel, in relation to social networks and culture helped me understand Taiwan more deeply through the sorts of questions these writers brought to their own regions.

Finally, in extension of this second activity, I think it’s essential that we engage within the academy to share our insights and questions. Too few fellow academics understand the value of what we do and how it might enrich their own work.

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Novels are important for us as anthropologists because if we’re doing any kind of ethnographic writing, we need to think about how to tell a story about people’s lives.

I reading novels to work on style is generally good advice for any discipline. A few months ago I mentioned Elmore Leonard’s ‘’Ten rules of writing’‘ on a thread here. I stand by the recommendation, but after posting the link then and rereading it did occur to me that Leonard’s advice is very verbocentric. That makes sense for a novelist because storytelling is all they do. But anthropologists have the option to avail themselves of other modalities.*

I don’t in any way think reading more novels is anything but good for anthropologists, so long as they stay aware of the fact that they have more options in their writing than do novelists and seek out models for those options from time to time, as well.

*But as an art history student who was a member of a seminar I took part in noted, material culture studies-related publications by cultural anthropologists rarely include adequate descriptions of the objects under discussion. Perhaps this is the seed for a later thread?

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(1) Novels are important for us as academics because they are a salutary reminder of what good writing looks like, and of how to write so that people will want to read what you write. Yes, of course there are badly written novels out there, but it is MUCH harder to get a novel published than an article for a scholarly journal, and good novelists work on the craft of writing in a way that, let’s face it, the overwhelming majority of academics do not.

(2) Novels are important for us as anthropologists because if we’re doing any kind of ethnographic writing, we need to think about how to tell a story about people’s lives. Now, novelists get to make stuff up and we don’t, but we share with them the imperative to compel the reader’s interest in the lives of people who are, to whatever degree, different from the reader’s own. Why should readers care? What’s in it for them to know these things about other people? For at least the past 200 years, the novel has been the most successful genre of writing at getting people to give a damn about other people that they’ve never met. So any of us presuming to write ethnography had better be paying attention to how this is done.

And let’s be realistic, here. After a day of teaching/teaching prep/grading/committee meetings/grant writing, would you rather sit down to the latest offering from Current Anthropology or the latest offering from Michael Chabon? I know which one I’d pick, and I’d challenge anyone to say that the latter isn’t a good use of my limited reading time.

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http://www.amazon.com/They-Say-Matter-Academic-Writing/dp/0393924092

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If you interpret such things as bugging people, then you’ve either never had to do it, or it hasn’t gone well when you did. Part of the anthropological difference either academic or practicing is going to involve you talking to people for no other reason than you needing to get information or data from them. This has been something at the forefront of a large body of anthropological writing for a very long time, and to say now that it isn’t something central to the discipline to recruit people or to enter into various social networks that you weren’t a member of before a study makes no sense. If you have some personal problem with me, that’s fine, but don’t think you’re gonna reinvent what it is that we do. There’s that old joke, that the four members of a Native American family are the mother, father, child, and anthropologist.

I fully agree with the sentiment or the essay, I just felt that other things were also good practices to keep in mind. I personally set aside time every week to learn another language, or to study things like social network analysis and multivariate statistics. The learning never stops.
If however, you’re the type of person that pisses other people off in social situations, or are too shy to do something like visit a type of church that is very different from what you’re used to, then it’s something you should know before you graduate. It’s said that about 80% of psychology is the psychology of university students, because that’s largely who gets recruited. How much anthropological research has been done with people who anthropologists already knew before the research began? My comment is extremely pragmatic.

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I was going to write up something about the Pinker/Carr ‘debate’ but they are both so focused on ‘intelligence’ as a sign of learning, and so obsessed with the brain as the sole location for mind and knowledge that I sort of think it is not worth it. It is funny to see Carr’s argument rooted, biographically, in his experience of middle age, and to see Pinker try to find a way to discuss the social configuration of learning and technology using only his narrowly cognitive/biological idiom. Maybe I’ll get around to it someday.

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