A few years ago, I had a chance to have lunch with David Price and some other people at the AAA meetings. Back then, he struck me as exactly like the kind of person you’d expect to be a professor at a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest. Which is exactly what he is. Graying beard, laid back manner. I couldn’t see his feet but if he was wearing Birkenstocks, I wouldn’t be surprised. But beneath this amiable exterior is one of America’s most impressive historians of anthropology, a radical thinker and untiring author whose relentlessly probes the dark corners of our discipline’s history. In the course of twelve years Price has written three books which have helped redefine anthropology’s understanding of itself. And now, with Cold War Anthropology, Price brings his massive, precedent-make (and -busting) history of anthropology and American power to a close. It’s a defining moment in the history of anthropology, and deserves wide attention.

Price uses many methods to write his books, but he’s best known for his FOIA requests: extracting classified material from the US Government using the Freedom Of Information Act. In essence, he has written a history of American anthropology out of the files of the FBI, CIA, and other three letter agencies which run our intelligence services. His first book, Threatening Anthropology demonstrated the how widespread FBI surveillance shaped anthropology and anthropologists in the 1950s. Anthropological Intelligence described how anthropologists took part in World War Two, ‘weaponizing’ the discipline with various degrees of success. Now, in Cold War Anthropology, Price shows us how anthropology’s war-time involvement  rolled over into support for America’s Cold War Empire, even as more radical parts of the discipline organized against American Power.

Price’s volumes are not light reads which carefully walk the reader through a big-picture account of anthropology and it’s relationship with American intelligence agencies. In them, Price never skimps on details, and brings you right into the weeds. His books tend to focus on particular individuals or institutions — indeed, they often feel like a guided tour of Price’s notebooks, or even the raw sources themselves. In fact, a good portion of Price’s trilogy just is reproductions of the documents he’s found. It’s a very effective method of writing. Seeing censored portions of documents, with whole lines (or more) blacked out gives you a sense of what research on this topic is like. At the same time, Price never loses the big picture. In fact, he struggles with it. In Cold War Anthropology in particular, we watch Price try to corral a massive archive of files order to extract from it a big picture  account of how the intelligence community, scholarly societies, and the academy collaborated to create area studies… among other things! It’s a remarkable achievement.

Price began his FOIA work around twenty years ago, and roughly a dozen years have passed between the appearance of the first book in the trilogy, Threatening Anthropology, and Cold War Anthropology. There’s a reason, then, that his books occasionally feel cramped, or overstuffed: Price has accomplished the work of a lifetime in just two decades. I’m sure that some reviewers will call it a phone book. But you know what? Sometimes you need curation! He’s created volumes so detailed and documented that are valuable contributions in and of themselves, but also point the way to future research. We should hope that  many scholars in the future to latch on to Price’s project and produce more work in the same vein drawing on the leads he’s unearthed.

If Price’s work was merely a history of the political economy of our discipline, then that would be enough. But more importantly, Price demonstrates that our discipline’s theories of power, economics, and ethnicity were shaped by its interaction with American intelligence agencies. That is to say, the intellectual content of our discipline itself, he argues, was shaped by the history he describes in ways that are essential, not tangential, to our central theoretical concerns. It’s a sobering insight, and one that is especially welcome today, when top-shelf anthropology sometimes seems less interested in explaining the world than in pointing out how incoherent, contradictory, recursive, incomplete, and partial it is. Yes, I imagine Price saying, looking up from a desk overflowing with stacks of censored, fragmentary, overwhelmingly large amounts of paper, but isn’t the goal is to describe complexity clearly? It’s not surprising that Price traces describes his own intellectual influences as scholars like Laura Nader and Marvin Harris.

Price has a well-earned reputation for a politics that is not just progressive, but radical. For instance, in addition to writing his trilogy he also managed to produce enough columns in Counterpunch to turn them into the book Weaponing Anthropology. I suppose that this might make some suspicious of Price’s impartiality and prudence as a scholar — especially when his subject is the American intelligence community. But Price’s radicalism is the best kind of radicalism. It springs not from ideological commitment or personal grievance, but from clear eyed view of just how profoundly borked the world is. Cold War Anthropology, like his other books, is driven by a social scientific agenda where truth, accuracy, and transparency are paramount. In this regard, he has more in common with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitress than Bob Avian.

These volumes could have been sensationalistic tell-alls of the many human weaknesses the FBI salaciously documented as it surveilled anthropology, or it could have been rabid denunciations of the wrong committed by anthropologists in the name of American empire. But instead Price takes the high road, noting the empirical and moral complexity of the history he uncovers. When he does — as he does — take his own moral stance on these issues, his credibility comes from the care with which he does his history.

Historians of anthropology will welcome this volume, but it is relevant for every anthropologist working today. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, anthropologists took Cold War money because there was so much of it. Today, when there is so little of it, anthropologists usually can only chose between funding with more strings attached, or less. In Cold War Anthropology Price paints pictures of anthropologists who struggled with the ethics of  funding, a picture which is not just a vision of our past, but a cautionary tale for our future. We will be making these same hard decisions more and more in the future. We have much to learn from our discipline’s recent past, and thanks to David Price we have the opportunity to see our field as it really was, warts and all. The stories in this book, and the issues that it raises, need to be discussed by the discipline as a whole.

Thomas Hylland Eriksen has a well-earned reputation for writing good, short books on large, intractable topics. His introduction to anthropology, history of the discipline, and books on globalization and ethnicity and nationalism have given the Norwegian anthropologist an international profile. We ran a preview of Eriksen’s new book on SM a while back (and have mentioned Barth more than once). So does Eriksen’s biography of Norway’s Greatest Anthropologist live up to the hype? Yes. But interestingly enough, in reading it you come to appreciate the author of the biography slightly more than you do its subject.

True to form, Eriksen has given us a concise book. Biographies can get big  — for instance, this book is 496 pages shorter than Michael Young’s Malinowski biography (or should I say the first volume of that biography!). One reason the volume is concise is that it is an insider biography, written by someone who is very familiar with Barth and his world. The book is not dripping in citations and little archival work appears to be done. Eriksen goes very light on background as well, giving us a page on Cambridge here and a page on structuralism there. Most readers will appreciate these deft and competent sketches of Barth’s contexts, but those with a scholarly interest in the history of anthropology will be disappointed that, for instance, that Barth does not shed much light on the world Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D.

The exception is the book’s close coverage of the development of social anthropology in Norway. For English language readers (and perhaps Norwegians as well?) this is the first and perhaps only monograph which covers this history — something that is not surprising, given that this book was originally written in Norwegian for a Norwegian audience. As someone who often deals with Norwegian colleagues, I appreciated the potted history that Eriksen provides here. But other readers might find certain passages a bit of a slog.

One of the dangers of insider biographies is that they can often pull their punches in order to protect their subjects. This is particularly a challenge in this case, since Barth is still alive, although retired and in managed care. Eriksen, perhaps aware of this danger, does a thorough job of describing both the positive and negative aspects of Barth’s life. Moreover, although Eriksen does not delve deep into an analysis of Barth’s psyche or personal motivations, one nonetheless emerges from the book with a clear idea of what the man is like, warts and all. Eriksen manages to show us why Barth deserves to be remembered without lionizing him, an impressive feat that not all biographers manage, especially with living subjects.

Really, commemorating Barth is Eriksen’s goal, rather than producing a scholarly contribution to the literature on the history of anthropology. Eriksen walks us through Barth’s life confidently, explaining the context that produced Barth’s monographs and articles. Eriksen does a good job providing potted descriptions of Barth’s books, as well as frank evaluations of their strengths and weaknesses. By the time you finish this book, you are eager to read more Barth. But, on the other hand, you don’t really have to. This scholarly skeleton key to Barth’s work is really a sort of guided tour of possible future reading for those will really want to, for instance, have a deep conversation with Tony Crook about Barth’s theory of ritual innovation in Bolivip. But for 90% of humanity,  you already know everything you need to about Cosmologies in the Making just by reading Eriksen.

There are places where I would have liked to see a bit more. For instance, Eriksen brushes over Barth’s austerely technical Models of Social Organization. I would have appreciated a more detailed exposition of this work, and Barth’s concept of ‘generative models’ more generally. Although Eriksen does provide an overview of these concepts, at times I felt they were more often invoked than explained – or at least I imagine that’s how they would feel to a reader who was not already familiar with them. Also, I would have liked more coverage of Barth’s reception by area specialists. What is the relationship of his work to that of Ashraf Ghani, anthropologist and now head of state of Afghanistan? True, Eriksen does describe criticisms of Barth, but I would have appreciated more bibliography here to help guide my reading not just of Barth, but of his scholarly reception.

Barth was one of the key figures in anthropology after World War II, and remains on the list of top anthropologists of that period. But saying why is difficult because Barth was so protean.  As a theorist, he argued for a kind of scientific modeling of social process. But he also wrote about ethnicity and ecology, and later on in his career pursued the sociology of knowledge. Ethnographically he was all over the map, conducting his best-known fieldwork in what is now Afghanistan and Iran, although the complete list of his field sites includes Oman, Norway, Bhutan, Bali, and Papua New Guinea.

In many ways, Barth’s work was designed to make him famous: dense technical writing on social organization that everyone respected but nobody read, one article (on ethnicity) that everybody read, and then a smorgasbord of articles on ecology, knowledge, and politics in variety of field sites that ensured that pretty much everybody would at least hear of him. Barth’s omnivorousness provides an interesting contrast to his contemporary Ward Goodenough,  who is less remembered today than Barth, perhaps because Goodenough put all of his eggs in just a few theoretical and areal baskets.

Still, I came away from this book with less respect for Barth than I had for him before I read it. In the brief time I’ve spent with Barth — mostly chatting at receptions — he struck me as a genial and diplomatic figure, something at the time I, perhaps mistakenly, attributed to Oxbridge refinement and not Norwegian reserve.  The man in Eriksen’s biography, on the other hand, comes across as highly driven and slightly self-centered.

The fifties and sixties were a time of massive, massive expansion for anthropology and the global economy more generally. Anthropologists of Barth’s generation, born in the late 1920s and early 1930s were members of an extremely small cohort that was showered with tremendous resources and ended up training the generation born after World War II. Even the recession of the 1970s didn’t effect Barth, whose country came into North Sea oil revenue just as other first world economies began stalling. It is interesting, then, to see what Barth did with this freedom.

Eriksen paints Barth as a charismatic academic entrepreneur, but reading between the lines, one also gets a sense of Barth as self-absorbed artist. Barth turned down a prestigious — but challenging — position in the United States for the safety (and control) of founding Bergen’s anthropology department. He left his wife for a younger woman (admittedly, in the late sixties, which was the high season for this sort of thing). He worked as an administrator for a time, but (it seems) never really aimed to build an institution or social network that would be more than a base from which he could work. This makes him very different from, say great academic politicians like Edmund Leach.

Reading this book, one also gets a sense of the limits of Barth’s accomplishments, both theoretically and ethnographically. An ethnographic wanderer, he lack a deep immersion in regional literature or even local languages. This also meant he never opened himself to the ethnographic vulnerability that deep entanglement with a field site entails. The chief reason Barth appears to be successful are that he worked in areas that were not described, and his ethnographies were published in a pre-Internet age, when anthropologists could make a reputation out of relieving an information bottleneck. He also relied extensively on key informants/assistants who Eriksen wisely credits — people who today might be scholars themselves (this is a polite way of saying: enabled by colonialism). And, of course, they were short.

It’s also not clear what his ethnographic accomplishments are. His work in Oman and Papua New Guinea was not particularly successful, and his research on Bhutan was never really published. Barth’s ethnographies of Swat and the Basseri are valuable, but they are also very short, and they lack the sort of deep scholarship we’d expect today — or at least some of us expect today! But I don’t think you see the in-depth case studies and analysis that you see in other ethnographers such as Turner. Rather, the holistic but also very general level of coverage reminds me of Nadel’s Black Byzantium. But shorter.

Barth also comes across as far less theoretically impressive than you might expect. In the 1950s many shared Barth’s ambition of trying to produce a social anthropology that was more rigorous and scientific, and which studied social relations while giving due to individual agency. Barth never deepened his commitment to his project the way J. Clyde Mitchell did, trying to realize the sort of social anthropology which social anthropologists claimed they wanted to do. Barth did not want to end up doing sociology, economics, or political science and, like many to come before and after him, gestured to an empirical and theoretical project that he never really ended up taking up.

Rather (perhaps in a bow to fashion) he pivoted in the direction of ‘meaning’, following a trajectory similar to (but less famous than) Victor Turner’s. His work in this period is very interesting, but one also gets a sense that it was impoverished by his theoretical isolation. Barth refused to read theoretical work that didn’t interest him, turning away from the great debates of his time because they didn’t personally suit him. In retrospect, opting out of the late Lévi-Strauss and the enthusiasms of structural Marxism is certainly understandable. But it also had its costs.

By never throwing his hat into the ring Barth missed a chance to enrich his own work and the work of others. Just think: a focus on agency and its limits, instrumental action and knowledge practices — Barth was supposed to be what Bourdieu became. And then, to make matters worse, he never read Bourdieu.  Barth, like Bourdieu, even worked in the tribal hinterlands of the Muslim world. Complaints about jargon aside, Outline of a Theory of Practice deserved the attention it got because of the way it moved social anthropological debates about agency, structure, and process forward by retheorizing the key terms of the debate.

Ultimately, one gets a sense that Barth began life as a big fish in a small pond, and then gradually lost the plot as the pond increased in size by two orders of magnitude. He is someone with aspirations to science, but also someone who found his intellectual style slightly out of place in a fully professionalized discipline. Of course, he stayed famous and continued to do good work. But ultimately lived his life for himself and not the institutions or intellectual projects around him. I don’t know. Perhaps you can’t expect someone to live in any other way.

At any rate, all of these ruminations are as much a result of Barth’s life choices as well as my own post-tenure mooting of The Point Of It All. But they are also the result of something else: Eriksen’s skill in telling Barth’s story. For indeed, while I came away from this book with my image of Barth slightly tarnished, I also had really come to respect Eriksen as an author.

Eriksen’s books feel like extended avuncular office hour with that one faculty member you always wished you got to spend more time with, but didn’t. Scattered amongst the volume are recommendations for further reading and nuggets of wisdom that are actually pretty nuggety. It’s 85% about Barth, but also 15% about being a good anthropologist as well. Perhaps most infuriatingly, Erikson always manages to write clear prose in an equanimous voice. And this despite the fact that his sentences are full of the constant hedging and passive voice constructions which makes the prose of others so unreadable. Or, perhaps as Eriksen would say, “it seems likely that many would say this book was well written.”

In sum, Eriksen’s well-written, balanced, and concise biography gives you a real chance to engage both Barth and his work. As anthropology moves on and Barth’s work seems more distant than ever from the axes ground by the current generation, Eriksen provides a convincing account of the relevance of the past, and offers a fitting memorial to an anthropologist whose life — warts and all — should not be forgotten.

Essentially what you’re about to read is a blog-embedded Storify of a review of a book (about a book), made up of tweets based on marginalia.

Enjoy.

Cultural Encyclopedia of the Penis
Michael Kimmel, Christine Milrod, and Amanda Kennedy, eds. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2014. 251 pp.

“Cultural Encyclopedia of the Penis” is a new publication (October 2014) from Rowman & Littlefield following fast on the heels of its companion “Cultural Encyclopedia of the Breast” which was released in September. I’m told that they’ve been warmly received by anthropologists, as they both sold out rather quickly at the R&L booth at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association this past December in Washington DC. As a budding scholar (ahem) of global masculinities, I thought it would have been silly to not take the opportunity to review Cultural Encyclopedia of the Penis, if not simply for the title and synopsis, definitely because of Michael Kimmel’s involvement. Kimmel, one of three editors (in addition to Christine Milrod and Amanda Kennedy), is one of the more well-known sociological scholars on men and masculinities in America. Of more than a dozen books on the subject, perhaps his best-known is “Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys become Men,” a book that I would highly recommend for undergraduate- and graduate-level students of Gender Studies. While some of Kimmel’s work is not without some anthropological blindspots (he is not an anthropologist after all), one should be able to approach Cultural Encyclopedia (henceforth, CEP) trusting that a book written by over 90 authors would ultimately deliver on its claim to being “cultural.” It should be noted that this review is written without any knowledge of the content and style of Cultural Encyclopedia of the Breast, which was edited by Merril D. Smith.

The book begins with a wonderful introduction by the editors that purports the encyclopedia to be presented in a Saussurean spirit of signifier/signified structuralism. The cover says it all: a clever trick that presents a penis-and-testicles motif that can also be seen as a torso and thighs. Indeed, this volume is replete with examples of the penis in the visual arts, literature, science, technology, medicine, archaeology, behavior, psychology, and more. The introduction is perhaps one of the most valuable readings in the book, as it reviews the multitudinous ways in which the penis can be imagined, manifested, symbolized, used, empowered, effeminized, and exploited. It is here that the reader is introduced to the many versions of the “cultural penis,” as a primer for what is in store in the pages that follow.

Oddly enough (and something of a full disclosure), as a Millennial (albeit, an older variety), thinking about the structure of this book has made me realize that I don’t really know what to expect from something claiming to be an encyclopedia beyond the fundamental idea that it is a collection of summaries of information (Check!) on a variety of topics (Check!) related to a particular theme (Check!), which is arranged alphabetically (Check!). It is strange for me to read an encyclopedia that can’t be clicked, edited, or augmented. Nonetheless, the CEP, as one would expect from an encyclopedia, is a collection of entries written by scholars and experts from all over the world who represent many different fields of study. There are, in my count, a total of 94 contributors to the encyclopedia, including the three editors. Of the 94 involved, I counted four anthropologists, plus Lisa Jean Moore (who is technically a sociologist, but has been known to straddle the line, so we’ll count her as one of ours for now).

Entries, of which there are 160 (sort of), can be a short as a paragraph or as long as four pages, depending on the topic. Each entry is followed by a “See Also” list of related topics, a “Further Reading” list of related (or cited) literature, and the name of the author of the entry in question. Despite some rather brief entries, I appreciate that every one of them is followed by resources for further reading (unless, of course, the entry simply refers the reader to another entry, e.g. Skoptsy [200] which simply refers to Castration or Eunuchs).

The entries themselves are written from a number of fields of expertise – gender studies, theology, urology, sexology, sociology, history, fashion, and even a little ethnographic work, though many of the entries rely too heavily on Freudian interpretations for my taste. They run the gamut from directly-related topics (e.g. Frenulum, Penazzling) to the seemingly irrelevant (e.g. Chippendales). I would have liked to have seen more non-Western beliefs and practices represented here, for instance, dhat, semen loss, semen practices, sperm competition, or traditional medicines.

Some entries are highly technical and tight while some are loose and vulgar, the latter sometimes akin to reading Urban Dictionary or even 4chan. Others balance the two somewhat impressively; for example, see “Cock Supremacy” (43) which relies solely on the word “cock” while making a Bourdieusian argument about the performance of masculinity. This polyphony, at first, was distracting but later I came to appreciate it – this may not be the case for casual readers who are not reviewing the book from cover-to-cover. Ultimately, each entry serves the purpose of familiarizing the reader with a basic understanding of the topic, and if the reader needs more information, they can at least approach that endeavor with a baseline.

The basic understanding to which I refer, however, is relative. What I mean here is that in many cases, the baseline established by an entry is woefully myopic at best, biased at worst – either Eurocentrically or biomedically. This criticism is rooted in my frustration with reconciling the claim of the book’s title and introduction as a Cultural encyclopedia, when in actuality it is more of a Western Popular Biocultural encyclopedia or Our cultural encyclopedia. I’ll give you two examples: “Circumcision (male)” and “Semen.”

“Circumcision (male),” which is arguably the most fruitful topic of cultural discussion in this book,  is instead the most dissatisfying read for the anthropologist (39; if you’re wondering, there is no entry called “Circumcision [female]”). The entry begins with a basic biomedical description of what it is (overlooking the fact that there are many forms), where (in the West) it is practiced, and the ways in which it is performed (in the United States). The entry moves on to describe circumcision as it relates to religion (i.e. Islam and Judaism) and hygiene. After a brief discussion of HIV/AIDS and global health in sub-Saharan Africa (ignoring the role that circumcision plays in the construction of masculinity), the entry finishes with intactivism, which is largely a Western phenomenon. Ultimately, the offering on circumcision was flat. If we return to the idea that this book gives readers short introductory crash courses, we see here that one could walk away from this entry with a baseline understanding that doesn’t even suggest that circumcision might be more nuanced than the idea with which they may have approached the book in the first place.

If Circumcision (male) is an example of the Eurocentrism that one might find in this book, Semen is the prime example of the biomedical (191). Offering less than a page of information, the entry on Semen revolves strictly around its chemical composition and function, which are objectively Western scientific understandings and interpretations; so where is the “cultural?” – at best, this is our cultural. The author seems to ignore the power and/or danger that is often ascribed to semen in different cultures, but at least Lisa Jean Moore picks up the slack in one of her entries, “Ejaculation (male)” (55; there is no entry called “Ejaculation [female]”). (Redundancy is no excuse; the entries for “Public Restroom” and “Tea Room” are nearly identical.) Likewise, all six paragraphs on the topic of “Erection,” save three sentences, are about anatomy and physiology. Unfortunately, this theme of the biomedicalized penis or Eurocentric penis runs rampant through the entire book. Do not misunderstand: my problem is not with the presence (or even abundance) of Western topics – as far as I know, “Gloryhole” is a strictly Western phenomenon – but that non-Western perspectives of global phenomena are so frequently excluded.

To conclude on a more positive note, I did find a great deal of value in topics such as Art & Artists (13; Marcos García-Diez and Javier C. Angulo), Bhutan Phallus (22; Richard W. Whitecross), Ejaculation (male) (55; Lisa Jean Moore), Gastronomy (77; Amy Marsh), Hijra (82; Shane P. Gannon), Koro (104; Robert E. Bartholomew), Koteka (105; Jenny Munro), Lingam (107; Rohit K. Dasgupta), Lynching (109; Neal A. Lester), Penis sheaths (148; José Blanco F.), Penis snatching (151; Louisa Lombard), Race (179; Neal A. Lester), Sambia Turnim (189; Jenny Munro), Size (196; Jared Del Rosso and Jennifer J. Esala), and Viagra (236; Leonore Tiefer).

Of these, both of Lester’s entries on Lynching and Race are two of the most provocative discussions of how the penis is viewed and symbolized with respect to hierarchies of power. Koro is a wonderful example of a culture-bound syndrome related to the penis – it’s a shame there aren’t more. Sambia Turnim, an entry on the Sambia of Papua New Guinea, seamlessly combines cultural interpretations of the third gender with the biomedical, though it would have made a prime place to mention semen practices. Likewise, the entry on Viagra turned out to be an excellent articulation of how one might call attention to the subjective nature of a biotechnology, with only the space in which it was intended to introduce a topic.

At the end of the day, CEP is a tough sell. It don’t find it particularly useful for my needs, except maybe to familiarize myself with wider literature through “Further Reading.” Many of the entries fall short of what one should expect from a cultural encyclopedia, but undergraduates may find value in the crash-course presentation style (with a lot of cross-cultural supplementation, of course). And while it’s not a criticism of the editors or authors, the cover price is astronomical, even for the academic consumer (about $80 for the hardcover OR the eBook). CEP will make a fine (if pricey) book to leave on the coffee table for my more conservative guests.

I’m a big fan of the University of Chicago Press’s series on academic life (disclosure: this may be because I went there for graduate school). Their series on writing, editing, and publishing  features several of my favorite titles, and their younger series on ‘the academic life’ has also gotten off to a good start. So I was optimistic about Bruce Shore’s The Graduate Advisor Handbook: A Student-Centered Approach. Having read it (disclosure: I received a free review copy), I don’t feel like it’s the Final Statement In Human History About Advising Graduate Students. But I do strongly recommend that you read it, especially if you are new faculty or a new graduate student trying to get a grasp of what good advising looks like.

Shore’s book is short (less than 150 pages of body text), and clearly and informally written, so it’s quite easy to get through. It’s broken up into six chapters covering topics across the lifespan of a graduate student, beginning with their first year and ending with letters of reference and other post-graduation support. Shore has spent time advising students and being the kind of administrator who deals with advising nightmares, and he comes across as a credible and authoritative narrator — I’d definitely want to be his advisee.

Shore has a Ph.D. in educational psychology, but never gives in to the schematic and scientistic excesses that crop up occasionally in the sort of education books published by Jossey-Bass. He freely draws on (anonymized) stories of advising successes and failures, so the book has a nice ethnographic feel and evidentiary base that anthropologists will appreciate.

Most of what Shore has to say is common sense and requires a simple sense of decency and integrity. And yet sometimes decency and integrity seems in short supply in the world today. This, combined with the fact that behavioral standards are rarely explicitly taught, means that it is worthwhile for Shore to remind us what even-handed, professional behavior looks like. You know Tolstoy’s line in War and Peace about all happy families being alike and all unhappy families being unhappy in their own way? Shore is trying to grow the size of the happy family of people who have their heads screwed on straight.

At times, I find Shore’s emphasis on appropriate behavior a little overdone. For instance, he suggests making sure that you not have a hotel room on the same floor as your graduate students at a conference, lest it appear you are sleeping with them. This seems to me to be overdoing it a little (elevators, anyone?). But having been The Dean For Sorting Things Out I’m sure he’s seen far more than I have, and has been knee deep in the sort of dysfunction that professors only glimpse, and graduate students only hear about. So take it for what you will — even if in the end you decide Shore’s advice can be too straight-laced, its still valuable to use it as a measure of your own conduct.

I said earlier that graduate students should read this book, and I meant it. Its important to understand what good advising is, whether you’re getting it, and how to change things if you aren’t. If you aspire to an academic career, its never too early to develop your professional skills. Once you’re on the job market, start reading books about how to be a good department chair. Think of them as ethnographies.

Finally, its worth noting that Chicago has priced this book right. Well, its not open access, so the price is technically wrong. But fifteen bucks for paper and under ten dollars for digital the price is easy to like, even given how short the book is.

The world is drowning in mediocre books on educational psychology and short volumes on mentoring that were written by and for the obviously clueless. Shore’s book is a refreshing change. I’d recommend it for anyone who wants to get on the right track when it comes to advising or being advised.

Plays Well in Groups: A Journey through the World of Group Sex
Katherine Frank. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2013. 406 pp.

“So, how did she…do her research?” This was a common response after mentioning to colleagues that I was reading a book “on the anthropology of group sex.” The critical intonation of the query comes from professional curiosity of these anthropology students and professors, and it is rooted in a (mistaken) assumption that the book is strictly ethnographic. Rather, Plays Well in Groups: A Journey through the World of Group Sex by Katherine Frank is an excellently researched collection of narratives – histories, current events, media studies, ethnographic works, and participant interviews – analyzed through a sex-positive and unifying anthropological lens. Frank’s task is drawing parallels between different forms and practices of group sex in general, while exploring deeper social, political, economic, and historical contexts in order to contrast them. Much of the book is about who has group sex and why, as well as who fears group sex and why. An overarching theme of the book is thus one that appealed to my interests: an emphasis on sexual taboo and transgression.

Mary Douglas wrote that pollution fears cluster around contradictions involving sexual behaviors, and that those fears produce highly reactive spaces (2002[1966]:194), and so it makes sense that group sex would serve as the object in a study of taboo and transgression. What is unfortunately absent from such a study is Mary Douglas herself. Admittedly, Frank seemed to get along just fine without her, coming to many of the same conclusions that Douglas wrote in Purity & Danger (and in the introductions to later editions), but I was nonetheless disappointed by her absence. Frank writes much about the sacredness of boundaries, drawing parallels between the body and society, even using the phrase “Me, not me,” throughout the book to illustrate where certain lines fall in the minds of participants, and yet Mary Douglas was nowhere to be found. Despite this single (though great – can you tell?) issue, a glance at the bibliography will tell you that Frank did not skimp on research.

The wide variety of materials from which Frank draws gives her a great deal of room within which to work, but it does, at times, become unwieldy. When I encountered Frank’s broad definition of group sex in the Chapter One (“The Elementary Forms of Group Sex”), I was rather pleased. No matter what kind of sex is practiced, her emphasis is on “the group,” and as such, “group sex” can be as “vanilla” as dyadic sex in the presence of an observer; the observer, of course, in the context of group sex is a participant. This broad definition makes it easy to survey many kinds of group sex – geographically and historically – and it gives the author the flexibility to do away with certain technicalities. (However, group sex in Second Life pushes the limits of her own definition.)

On the other hand, while the chapter topics are evident and organized in a thoughtful way, the discussion within the chapters may jump around. For instance, Chapter Three (“Disgust, Shame, and Guilt: The Primordial Soup of Desire,” which, despite the title, is happily devoid of any appeal to evolutionary psychology), is about the psychological issues associated with group sex. In it, Frank bounces from the story of French socialite Catherine Millet (and her “diabolical” memoir that detailed her life of sexual promiscuity) to how animals (and humans) learn to have sex through play; from defining disgust, shame, and guilt (each one, while related, is illustrated with vastly different examples) to gang rape and social hierarchies (in evolutionary perspective, as a weapon of society, and as a weapon of war); from victims of gang rape across cultures to how some sex educators combat public notions of disgust, shame, and guilt; from how swingers are portrayed in the media to the next chapter, which is actually a case study of the Marind-anim.

The transitions from topic to topic aren’t necessarily elusive, but they can move rather quickly. More than once I found myself looking for the connection between this topic and that, only to be moved on to another; it can be exhausting. Ultimately, I’m afraid the author’s focus on breadth (and what great breadth there is!) may have sacrificed the depth that I was looking for, though this less a criticism, and more an admission of my own personal hang-up – some people are into less-than-linear reading. Regardless of how I feel, Frank should certainly be lauded for rising to the challenge of shoring up such a rich assortment of materials and drawing unifying themes between and around large bodies of research.

At the same time, there is a very good reason for the variety of topics, as she points out in the last chapter, in that it illustrates that group sex – and even just “sex” – does not mean the same thing for everyone everywhere. One of Frank’s strengths is in how she couches her analyses of particular cultural phenomena in sociopolitical contexts. In Tehran, group sex is youthful rebellion against tradition and the morality police. In Mozambique, participation in group sex is to (re)claim bodily sovereignty in an otherwise unpredictable life. In the United States, swingers are typically white, suburban adults who prefer “staying under the radar and maintaining the status quo” (284). Even across time, the meanings change, as Frank points out that young gay men today cannot fathom the experiences of the liberation movement in the 1970s, and likewise a gay man from the 1970s would have a hard time imagining the sensory overload of circuit parties; both frames, Frank investigates in earnest.

In Chapter One, she explains her methods and motivations, in addition to establishing useful definitions – what “counts” as group sex. In Chapter Two, Frank addresses the history of group sex and, notably, the public imagination. She writes at great length about the political uses of the stigmatization of group sex. Chapter Three is the most ethnographic in that Frank introduces how one is initiated into different types of groups, their jargon, the faux pas of newbies, and the concept of space-making. As mentioned above, the psychology of group sex is the focus of Chapter Four. Between Chapters Four and Five is the first case study, a fascinating anthropological literature review of the Marind-anim and so-called “semen practices.” Chapter Five is on human biology and group sex. It covers habituation, sperm competition, the role of dopamine, and spiritual experiences, among other things. In Chapter Six, Frank writes about the uses of group sex as experimentation, adventure, and play. (As another example of Frank’s circuity, this chapter features Burning Man, Second Life, a reality show on Playboy TV, drug-use and group sex, adolescent behavior, and the rise and fall of porn star Annabel Chong.) Frank begins Chapter Seven, on bonding and identity, with a narrative about a bachelor party in Las Vegas, but moves quickly to a focus on sexual violence and, in particular, the use of gang rape as a weapon. Wedged between Chapters Seven and Eight is the second case study, this time a short exploration of how group sex became the political expression of the gay liberation movement in the United States. This is a great primer for Chapter Eight, which starts with the use of group sex as an act of rebellion in Tehran, but then moves (somehow) to an ethnographic account of the author’s experiences at the Playboy Mansion, and then (more understandably) the life of Hugh Hefner. In Chapter Nine, Frank discusses the intersection of risk-taking, sex addiction, and group sex. Finally, in Chapter Ten, Frank takes a step back to recap many of the topics she has touched on. She half-heartedly uses this chapter as an opportunity to seek out the function of group sex, only to ultimately concede that meaning is assigned by different people in different ways and in different contexts. Additionally, there are two appendices. Appendix A is a very short clarification of misconceptions about STI prevalence and group sex. Appendix B is a thought provoking discussion about social scientists and their duties and responsibilities as they research sexual behaviors.

If you’re interested in an anthropological survey of group sex across geographies, times, and fields of study, be sure to pick up Plays Well in Groups. The wide variety of topics and perspectives that are discussed in this book make it a perfect reading material for any undergraduate social science course on sexual behavior and politics or even gender studies, though some of the chapters would fit just as easily in the context of a graduate seminar. I wouldn’t hesitate to market this book to the wider public as a casual read either, at least for more sex-positive readers.

Douglas, Mary. 2002(1966). Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge.

Scott repeats several common criticisms of Diamond in his review: he likes Diamond’s discussion of endangered languages and is disappointed by how obvious Diamond’s advice on how to live is. It is the final third of his review which really shines.

Scott’s first argument will be familiar to anyone who has read Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History: Diamond’s “fundamental mistake,” Scott writes, is to try to “triangulate his way to the deep past by assuming that contemporary hunter-gatherer societies… show what we were like before we discovered crops, towns, and government.” Rather, he argues,

The inference of pristine isolation, however, is completely unwarranted for virtually all of the 35 societies he canvasses [Scott excepts PNG]. Those societies have, for the last five thousand years, been deeply involved in a world of trade, states and empires and are often now found in undesirable marginal areas to which they have been pushed by more powerful societies… So thoroughly have they come to live in a world of powerful kingdoms and states that one might call these societies themselves a ‘state effect’… Contemporary foraging societies, far from being untouched examples of our deep past, are up to their necks in the ‘civilised world’ (this quote and all others are from Scott’s review)

This is an important point for people to realize: the people Diamond discusses were not on pause until The West showed up with a giant remote control labelled “colonialism” and pressed its play button. They are the results of colonial history, not something that proceeded it. Every single one of them (Papua New Guinea included).

Scott’s second point deals with the idea that “maintenance of peace within a society is one of the most important services that a state can provide” and that people naturally chose to live in them for the security they provide. Scott disagrees. First, he points out that the state centralizes violence, rather than curbing it. Second, and more importantly, Scott points out that, frankly, it sucked to live in an early state. Reading Diamond’s account, Scott writes, ” one can get the impression that the choice facing hunters and gatherers was one between their world and, say, the modern Danish welfare state. In practice, their option was to trade what they had for subjecthood in the early agrarian state.” This included a world of slavery, patriarchal authority, wars and rebellions, and labor exploitation. Diamond argues that the ever-present threat of violence in ‘traditional societies’ led people to embrace living in states. But in fact, Scott argues, hunter gatherers had many methods to avoid violence such as compensation and migration — methods which, I might add, Diamond himself praises at great length in his book. Their diet was healthier (another Diamond point) and their lifestyle was as well — Scott points out the dangers of germs (another Diamond favorite) in large, unhygienic early cities. “It’s hard to imagine Diamond’s primitives giving up their physical freedom, their varied diet, their egalitarian social structure, their relative freedom from famine, large-scale state wars, taxes and systematic subordination in exchange for what Diamond imagines to be ‘the king’s peace’.” Scott concludes.

Furthermore, Scott points out that violence in ‘traditional societies’ the Diamond examines is the result of living in “a world of states,” not living in one free of them. Much ‘tribal fighting’ is the result of non-state people scrambling to access the rare goods that state-dwellers desired but non-state people had access to: ivory, pelts, and so forth.

Those familiar with Scott’s work will not be surprised to see the angle of approach that he takes in this essay. Those who are familiar with the critical reception Diamond has received in the blogosphere will also see that Scott’s points have been made before, most especially in a post on Jason Antrosio’s Living Anthropologically blog. Still, it is nice to have these points made by a ‘big name’ in a ‘real publication’ and in under 4,000 words. To some — for instance: me — the idea of James Scott criticizing Jared Diamond for writing a big-picture book about that falls apart when subject to scrutiny by specialists will seem a little ironic. But this is a worthwhile review that deserves wide readership.