Most people remember Chelsea Manning (then Bradley) as the person who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks. After being imprisoned for the leak, Manning has become an activist and intellectual in her own right, as well as the center of an ongoing struggle to make sure her rights are respected in prison. And in her free time… she reads anthropology.

This according to a New York Post article Manning recently faced the possibility of indefinite solitary confinement because of the items she had in her possession, including a tube of toothpaste and a copy of Biella Coleman’s excellent ethnography Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy — The Many Faces of Anonymous (creative commons licensed PDF here). You knew anthropology ends up in unusual places — now we know that includes the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth.

The other anthropologist to make the news recently was Flagg Miller of UC Davis. Miller holds the unique title of being the only person in the world to sit down and listen to all 1,500 cassette tapes in Osama Bin Laden’s personal cassette tape collection.  My favorite part of the BBC’s piece on Miller’s new book, Audacious Ascetic: What the Bin Laden Tapes Reveal About Al-Qa’ida comes when Miller shows the reporter the earliest known recording of Bin Laden from the late 1980s. Recording quality is poor and the reporter asks “But how can you tell it’s Bin Laden?” There’s a short pause and Miller replies “Well… I’ve listened to over a thousand hours of him speaking…” That’s anthropology for you — you work it into your bones, and it’s that lived experience that lets you make the hard calls.

Anthropologists worry constantly that there isn’t enough public anthropology. But how much public anthropology is enough public anthropology? We are reaching all kinds of audiences in all kinds of ways — and with research totally different than the usual white-on-brown village ethnography that people (including us!) imagine that we do. So let’s give ourselves some credit where credit is due and pat ourselves on the back for showing up in unexpected — but important — places.

My first book published in the United States, Leviathans at the Gold Mine, is now available from Duke University Press. Duke has asked me to tell you it is superb and to urge you to buy multiple copies since it will fundamentally alter the course of anthropology as we know it, etc. etc. Whatever: I’m willing to let you make your own minds up should you care to read it. The key point of this post is not that you should buy it, but that you must: the book is not open access.

Why not? After all, major presses are certainly willing to consider at open access. My friends and collaborators Biella Coleman and Chris Kelty have both released their books under creative commons licenses, and Coding Freedom (get it? Is “freedom” the noun or the direct object?) and Two Bits are both available for free. Furthermore, I’ve spend a decade arguing about the importance of open access and vociferously criticizing its opponents. What went wrong?

The answer — as Lowie and Sahlins always insist it is — is history. I wrote this book in a very difficult period of my life when I was juggling being a new father, applying for tenure, teaching, and of course writing for Savage Minds. The process of publishing a book, or doing any thing in life, really, is one of compromise: you never get around to adding that one section you want to add. You never get around to citing those people you think should be cited. You never revise that sentence that is written backwards. You try to make your work perfect, until you are exhausted, and then you decide its done enough. I think there’s a lot of truth in the old line “works of art are never finished, only abandoned”.

Early on in the process of writing Leviathans I was actually hesitant about pushing for an open access version. Although Duke seemed like it could be accommodating — they had published Two Bits, after all — my tenure application was filled with open access pieces and forms of ‘service’ (like this blog) that might not be intelligible to older scholars. I felt, in other words, like producing something old fashioned and locked down might be a good idea. By the time I got over that and just decided to do the right thing, the book was pretty far along in production. I sent an email to my editor, but didn’t hear back from him (when people are busy it sometimes takes more than one email). At that point I was just too tired to push anymore, and things rolled along down a very satisfactory, but closed, path.

A part of me feels like after over a decade of anthropology blogging and a career trying to publish in open access journals (or adding access to my author’s agreement) I am pretty well entitled to publish just one damn thing the normal way. But of course the goal is to make open the new normal. So to a certain extent, I just feel guilty.

Opponents of open access often assume that its advocates are not practical people. They feel like we have never seen the budget for a journal, or sat on the board of a book series, or worked with a copyeditor before. But our vision of a world where knowledge is free did not come about because of our isolation from actually existing publishing, it was born in the teeth of it. The steps we take towards that goal push boundaries and challenge expectations, but they are not made in ignorance. They are made, a lot of the time, in a state of exhaustion and a keen realization of the difficulties of keeping forward momentum. When I met with the managing editor of Cultural Anthropology in 2012 to talk about the process of going open access, I suggested that they charge readers to download the articles if that was what they needed to do to make the transition from Wiley to a pure gold OA solution.

I’m disappointed that my book won’t be (immediately) available to read free of charge, and the fault is really with me, not my publisher. But if there is one lesson to be learned from the grueling last stretches of actually pushing a book out into the world, it is that open access advocates are realistic people who do their best to have the courage of their convictions and think other people should do the same. Sometimes we succeed, at other times we fail. But at no time are we insulated from the realities of publishing and the hard work that it takes to make it happen.