I was paging through Claude Levi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, which is a truly wonderful collection of short pieces documenting the literary world’s response to Levi-Strauss. Sontag’s well-known essay is really just one thing on offer in the volume. Today of course it seems dated and even a record of might-have-beens — Bob Scholte, anyone? — but it does help us remember exactly how hard structuralism hit when it hit the US. One of my favorite pieces in there is Edmund Leach’s “Brain Twister”:http://www.nybooks.com/authors/6718 a review of The Savage Mind and From Honey To Ashes. It is short and well written, and honestly, if you only had to read four pages on structuralism, these are as good as anything else I’ve seen. The piece originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, and if you don’t have a library (or library card) nearby, you can buy the article for a very reasonable three dollars from NYRB.
In fact Leach wrote a lot for NYRB — you can find “all his articles here”:http://www.nybooks.com/authors/6718. Geertz was “written even more”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=11947 (check out his two bits on “Jared Diamond”:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17850) and the NYRB’s “archives”:http://www.nybooks.com/archives/ give you a list of all authors by last name which is terrific for browsing. Here’s “P”:http://www.nybooks.com/authors/browse?first_letter=P for instance.
I rarely read the NYRB myself, but it is one of those journals that has enormous amounts of ‘period feel’ available for those who want, as it were, the ethnography behind the ethnography. Sahlins’s “Cannibalism and Culture”:http://www.nybooks.com/authors/4330 debate in the pages of the NYRB surely deserves to be more widely (re)read and is great to teach opposite Harris. So there’s always a gem or two in there and the website makes it easy to find them and buy them — definitely much easier than the microfilm I used to poor through.
The NYRB continues to be one of the best non-academic journals around. Almost every issue has at least one or two excellent articles, and they were way ahead of other journals in producing first rate criticism of the war in Iraq. They have had great articles on debates in evolutionary biology, philosophy of the mind, and a wide range of other topics. I think they suffer because of their name – only some of their articles are “book reviews” in the traditional sense, and many people seem to get them confused with the NY Times Book Review section … They can still be awfully stodgy and old-fashioned at times (their film criticism is awful), but there is more than enough good stuff there to make up for that.
I didn’t know about the Leach articles, I’ll have to check that out. Thanks!
I love the NYRB. I also love the London Review of Books, which also publishes stuff by heady folks and is much more cutting edge than the rather stuffy TLS. I like the style that academics adopt when publishing in these mainline book reviews: less formal, more open, more captivating.
You can say that again. Arguably there is no greater barrier to dissemination of what anthropologists have to say than the turgid prose that fills most academic journals.
A few should be kept, perhaps, for use in initiation ceremonies: “Your next test will be to read the following 20 articles. Use of aspirin, other headache remedies or stimulants will result in immediate disqualification.”
I agree with John, but with a rider. I often hear people say that academics can’t ‘get their message out’ to ‘the public’ because of their terrible prose, which is true as far as it goes. But sometimes people saying this assume that _within_ the university people actually enjoy reading this kind of stuff! I think readability results in impact within the university as well, and just because we _can_ read the turgid stuff dosn’t mean we like to. So yeah — good prose counts. But everywhere.