When the Roman Empire collapsed, numerous libraries and an unknown quantity of books disintegrated with it. Amid a rising Christianity hostile to traces of paganism, the texts of many authors admired in Roman antiquity were turned to dust and the memory of their existence dissolved. Pieces of writing by noted figures such as Cicero or Virgil certainly survived, but the majority of what these men wrote has been lost. This was an epochal moment in the history of writing: an imperial collapse so profound that it physically disintegrated vast amounts of texts, erasing them from human memory.

Some books from ancient Rome were saved from this massive vanishing of written words only because a few copies survived for over a thousand years in the libraries of European monasteries. This survival was often the outcome of pure chance: that is, a set of conjunctural factors somehow allowed those books, and not others, to overcome the wear and tear and ruination of paper and ink by the physical pressures and cuts inflicted on them by the weather and by the living forms attracted to them, primarily insects, mice, and humans. In these monasteries, many ancient books and their words disintegrated after a few centuries, gone forever. But others lingered and were eventually copied by hand again on new and more robust paper, which could withstand atmospheric and bodily pressures for the next two to three centuries. Three hundred years or so later, another monk would grab a manuscript about to disintegrate and copy those words again. Who knows how many amazing books were eaten away by bugs simply because no monk chose to save them from their ruination? One of the books that miraculously survived in a monastery over a millennia of chance encounters with the void was Lucretius’ extraordinary philosophical treatise De rerum natura, The Nature of Things.

What got me thinking about the ruination of written words is Stephen Greenblatt’s fascinating (if uneven) book The Swerve, which narrates how in 1417 a book-hunter discovered Lucretius’ The Nature of Things in a remote monastery. In my book Rubble, I examined how different forms of ruination, from the Spanish conquest to the soy boom, have created constellations of nodes of rubble in northern Argentina, many of which are perceived by locals to be haunted (Gordillo 2014). I therefore read The Swerve with an eye sensitive to the destruction of places and matter and the affective materiality of their debris. The richness conveyed by Greenblatt’s story of the vanishing of Roman books reveals that the physical disintegration and afterlives of rubble also involve the written word, which in the modern world is often presented as an emblem of human endurance.

The striking thing about The Nature of Things’ close encounter with its ruination is how closely it resonates with Lucretius’ ideas about matter, contingency, decay, and the void. Lucretius conceptualized and celebrated in poetic verse the immanent materiality of the world through the lens of Epicurus’ atomism: the thesis —first articulated in Greece centuries earlier— according to which everything is made out of atoms and void. Written around 40 BC and admired as well as controversial in its days, The Nature of Things argued that atoms are always moving in the void, clashing with each other because of their clinamen, or tendency to “swerve.” Amid whirlwinds of random collisions, atoms create the energy of the universe and all motion, life, and destruction. Hostile to religious transcendence, Lucretius celebrated chance and the sensuous, fleeting becoming of life. The Catholic Church condemned Lucretius as a pagan writer and by the early middle-ages De rerum natura had been largely forgotten, except by a few scholars who saw it cited in ancient texts. Yet in a remote monastery those ideas lingered in the fragile materiality of those written words penned by a man who had long been dead. Those markings on paper were not just signs with meaning and poetic symbolism: they were traces, left by a human hand, that had the power to affect.

Once discovered and disseminated more widely as a book in 1471, Lucretius’ text subsequently affected some of the most prominent physicists of early modernity such as Gassendi and Galileo. As Greenblatt shows, when in 1633 the Inquisition condemned Galileo for claiming that the Earth moved around the sun, one of the charges was that he was under the influence of atomism and its pagan physics of motion, which contradicted Aristotle’s ontology of spatial fixity and stasis. As Michel Serres has argued in The Birth of Physics, Lucretius is often misread as an imaginative poet rather than a rigorous philosopher of physics. But the quantum revolution in physics in the 1900s demonstrated that Lucretius had brilliantly anticipated, if in rudimentary form, that the material makeup of the universe comprises, indeed, a ghostly dance of subatomic patterns in the void. Further, Lucretius deduced the existence of atoms through the observation of the decay and decomposition of objects such as books, which in disintegrating into smaller and smaller fragments reveal that the seeming solidity of matter hides its constitutive void.

The story of the greatest philosophy book that survived from the times of the Roman Empire may seem distant from the experience of writing in our high-tech, hyper-digitized twenty-first century. Writing has become so deterritorialized, so agile in its capacity to connect humans across continents through screens, cables, and fiber optics that it is easy to forget that writing has not ceased to be, and cannot but be, a material practice that produces a physical object, the written word. Today, as it was in the days of Lucretius, writing is a form of thinking that mobilizes a geometry between the hands (or other bodily organs) and tools for leaving material traces on an object. On a computer, these traces may be digitized but bits of energy are material nonetheless. This materiality makes of written words, either printed or digitized, objects always-already subject to ruination. As in medieval monasteries, to prevent written words from vanishing, human beings have to copy them over and over again as hardcopies or data files. Writing undoubtedly creates transcendence, and what Lucretius wrote indeed survived his times and still affects us today. But written words are immanent traces that, like all objects, as Lucretius wrote, eventually decompose into atoms moving in the void.

References

Gordillo, Gastón. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Durham: Duke University Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen. 2011. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. New York: Norton.

Lucretius. 2007. The Nature of Things. New York: Penguin.

Serres, Michel. 2000. The Birth of Physics. Manchester: Clinamen Press.

I ended up reading a lot this summer. Not as much as I ended up playing video games, or working on image permissions for a book I’m editing. But I did read a lot. I just didn’t read what I thought I was going to read or was planning on reading.

What I was going to read

My eyes are always bigger than my stomach, text-wise, but realistically I was hoping to finish the summer reading these books:

Bruno Latour in Pieces: An Intellectual Biography, Henning Schmidgen

There are lots of secondary sources out there on Latour, but I was particularly interested in this one because it focused on Latour’s early years, including his time in Africa and education in Burgundy. Finally, I thought, someone read Charles Peguy so I won’t have to.

Meeting The Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Karen Barad

Anyone who writes an article entitled “Nature’s Queer Performativity” deserves a look. Especially since I’m trying to get back in touch with physical sciences, but in a non-stupid way.

Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography, Thomas Hylland Eriksen

I have a long-term interest in the history of anthropology and Norwegians, so this book by Norwegian Historian Of Anthropology Thomas Hylland Eriksen seemed a natural.

Unearthing Conflict: Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru, Fabiana Li

I study corporate mining but Latin America is the area I know the least about. A revised dissertation on the topic published by Duke is right in the center of my interests, especially since it is coming out of UC Davis, an increasingly prominent department in anthropology. Also, ‘Fabiana Li’ is a really cool name.

Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged From Matter, Terrence Deacon

Technically an anthropologist, Deacon is the real inspiration behind How Forests Think, which really impressed me and made me want to go deeper. This is also part of my ‘getting back to the sciences’ theme.

… and what actually happened

So how did I do? Well… uh…

I did actually read the Barth biography, which I reviewed for the blog and really enjoyed. I also got about a third of the way through the Deacon, which is pretty good given that the book is 624 pages long.  I read the first chapter of the Li, and the first two of the Barad, and a quarter of the Schmidgen. They were all good books, and I’d recommend them all (thought the Schmidgen is much lighter on context than I was hoping for). But I ended up moving on to other things however, mostly because the other things were more pressing and easier to read. So what did I actually read?

Fredrik Barth: An Intellectual Biography, Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Yes. you see, some list items do come true!

Alchemy in the Rain Forest: Politics, Ecology, and Resilience in a New Guinea Mining Area, Jerry Jacka

My friend and colleague Jerry Jacka did fieldwork in the same place as me at the same time as me, and this is his book. It’s a really accessible ethnography about of beliefs about place in Porgera, our shared valley. I have complex theoretical disagreements with some things he said, but that’s true of most people I meet, so don’t let that put you off! Recommended for lower-level undergrad ethnography courses.

Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, Misty Copeland and Charisse Jones

I am teaching this text in an undergraduate class how to be successful and learn new things, and I wanted to make sure my students got a taste of the performing arts, not just business and STEM. Beautifully written by Misty Copeland (the the greatest African American ballerina of her generation) and Charisse Jones (who turned interviews into effortless, page-turning prose), this is a rags to riches story that is as much about inspiring teachers as it is one woman’s quest to excel. I’m hoping the racial dimensions of Copeland’s struggles will help my students understand what race is like on the mainland.

Lives in Ruins: Archaeologists and the Seductive Lure of Human Rubble, Marilyn Johnson

This book got so much press from everyone except anthropologists! Ivy is a successful nonfiction author who brings quirky corners of the world to life, and this time her target is archaeologists. With a chapter on John Shea and another on the impossibility of the academic job market, this a good one to give to aspiring trowel monkeys. Also, if you don’t actually know what archaeology is (tsk tsk) this book will enable you to drink successfully with people who only talk about use-wear analysis.

Blood Will Out, Walter Kirn

I’ve always felt that there was a deep connection between anthropologists and con men, one that redeemed one of us or damned the other — I’m not sure which. Kirk’s memoir of befriending a murderer masquerading as a Rockefeller is written in prose beautiful enough to belong in literary fiction. It’s a meditation partially on how the murderer did it, but also Kirn’s own remarkably fracked up life and why he allowed himself to be duped. I was hoping for less denunciation of Rockefeller and more discussion of his tactics. But reading this a metaphor of fieldwork — but who is the studying who? — was pretty interesting. Your mileage may vary.

Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War, Peter Mandler

Mandler’s closely researched prosopography of Mead, Bateson, and Geoffrey Gorer during World War II is one of the few books on anthropology during this period. A historian of national character studies and not an anthropologist, Mandler is blissfully free from the complex baggage that most anthropologists bring to discussions of Mead. This extremely detailed account presents Mead as a flawed but decent person making complex choices in challenging times. Bateson and Gorer come across as much more loser, though. If you’re serious about the history of the discipline, diving into this one is a good idea. If you’re looking for a light read on Mead, skip it.

Cora Du Bois: Anthropologist, Diplomat, Agent, Susan Seymour

Cora Du Bois’s name should be on everyone’s lips as one of the greatest anthropologist of her generation, and perhaps of all time. Her life story is unbelievable: Anthropologist, spy-master, lesbian, confidante of Julia Childs, and the first female full professor at Harvard. At long last she finally receives the attention she deserves in this biography from her student Susan Seymour. Seymour’s strong personal desire to tell this story — and, I suspect, her editor’s desire to get Du Bois’s life on record — has made this book a reality. Seymour is not a master biographer, but she’s certainly competent, her research is solid, and Du Bois’s story tells itself. Readable and especially worthwhile for the way it puts Du Bois back on the map as an inspiring role model for all anthropologists today, male or female, queer or straight.

The semester is nearly complete, and summer is upon us. After finishing my first year in graduate school, I have this to say: I had no idea that I was capable of reading so much so quickly. Wow.

And yet, there were many things that I wanted to read and could not fit into those tiny pockets of “free” time. You know what I’m talking about, right? You get that itch that says, “If only there were more hours in a day, I would totally pick that book up!” And reading Carole’s Ethnographic Theory syllabus is not helping matters.

So I need to keep this momentum going; here is my summer reading list for 2015. It serves a few purposes, so it has to be somewhat calculated. This time next year, I’ll need to turn in a substantial literature review that gestures (somehow) toward my dissertation research/proposal, so now is the time to ramp up my consumption of readings that will contribute to it. There are also some things that I feel like reading, because “How have I gone this long without reading that” (e.g. Nietzsche)? One is out of sheer curiosity (i.e. Bennett). A few things I’ve read in the past, but I’d like to revisit with a full year of graduate social theory seminars under my belt (e.g. Foley, Fullwiley). And I owe Duke University Press a review (i.e. Starn; coming soon!). Naturally, this does not include the rapidly growing list of articles – classics, landmarks, and brand new publications – that I’ll need to whittle away.

In order (by nothing other than a sense of urgency, I guess):

Starn, Orin. 2015. Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2012. The Genealogy of Morals. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications.

Foley, Ellen E. 2010. Your Pocket is What Cures You: The Politics of Health in Senegal. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Fullwiley, Duana. 2012. The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Patterson, Donna A. 2015. Pharmacy in Senegal: Gender, Healing, and Entrepreneurship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Amselle, Jean-Loup. 1998. Mestizo Logics: Anthropology of Identity in Africa and Elsewhere. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Roitman, Janet L. 2014. Anti-Crisis. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Piot, Charles. 2010. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Rapp, Rayna. 2000. Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. New York: Routledge.

Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

Of course this list may change, but this is the goal I’m setting. It could probably be much longer, but I think this is a safe amount given that I’ll be in the field for two months, and I can never predict how much time I have to read while I’m there.

So what are you reading this summer? (Got any suggestions?) Will you take books to the field? (And if so, how do you allot the time to read in the field?) Let us know in the comments!

Robert Boice is a professor at Stony Brook whose work combines psychology, rhetoric, and English. He’s had a long career studying writer’s block and faculty productivity. He’s written well-known books like Professors as Writers. His focus is really on what makes people successful, happy writers. The title of his masterpiece book pretty much tells you what he studies: How Writers Journey To Comfort And Fluency. It’s a mammoth, reflexive piece on how writers write that describes the writing workshops he used to run for people suffering writer’s block. Apparently the first stage was them often demanding that he (a psychologist) just hypnotize them out of writer’s block, which he then proceeded to do. They ran around for a day or two telling people they’d been cured but the writer’s block didn’t go away. Then, he says, he could finally get around to teaching them.

So how do writers journey to comfort and fluency? Boice’s answer is, like most profoundly right answers, very simple: most fluent writers enjoy writing, they do it regularly, and they make it a routine. Boice stresses that it is much better to write for twenty minutes three times a day than three hours a day twice a week. I am actually a big believer in this — I rarely write for hours at a time, but I do chip away at pieces here and there over the course of the day. And I never, as Boice advises, worry about ‘getting into’ writing mode. Twenty minutes before class is plenty of time to write. Boice has inspired many loyal students in his time. Key among them is Peg Boyle Single, whose book Demystifying Dissertation Writing is my top recommendation for a Boice-style book on writing dissertations.

Overall, Boice’s goal is really to get you thinking about writing as part of a healthy life, which includes an ongoing intellectual project. For him ‘prewriting’ is key: thinking about what you are going to say, or letting ideas knock around in your head. In writing you let yourself be led along by your ideas, of course, but it is important to see writing as the last stage of a long process of thinking and reflection, not the first stage of that process.

For Boice, most writing is prewriting. For Joseph Williams, most writing was rewriting. Boice focused on the life process that surrounded the act of writing. Joseph Williams figured out how to write clearly in English. He’s the second major figure I want to talk about.

To be fair, Williams is just part of a larger network of scholars who have made major advances to our understanding of how to write and think clearly. This is the University of Chicago school (‘sly Aristotelians’ is how one person referred to them) of thinking that includes Joseph Williams, Wayne Booth, Gregory Columb, and (a bit more peripherally) Gerald Graff. These people produced a series of books like The Craft of Research and The Craft of Argument that present a whole way to conceptualize what it means to think critically. It is less focused on the psychologically, big picture aspects of the writing process and more on mechanics of doing research, convincing others, and writing clearly – something we see clearly in books like Graff’s They Say/I Say and Thomas and Turner’s Clear and Simple as the Truth.

Williams’s part in this was to discover what, psychologically and linguistically, counted as clear prose in English, but to create a method of teaching it to others. This is what his book Style does. Its been through many editions and been (imho) ruined the more textbook companies have inflated it. So I’d recommend the peerless 1995 edition, Style: Towards Clarity and Grace. I don’t know what else to say: Williams’s method works. Its that simple. Everyone should do it. Like Boice’s work, it is simply correct and deserves a much wider audience.

William’s method is very concrete and works very well: The hero of your story should be the grammatical subject of the sentence. The subject should occur towards the beginning of the sentence. Nominalizations should be avoided. Paragraphs will cohere if there is a consistent topic string in them. Old information should come at the start of a sentence, and new information at the end. Trust me: it works.

The nice thing about the Williams school is that they publish with the Chicago Guides to Writing Editing, and Publishing which produce very affordable ebooks. In particular, the latest version of Turabian’s famous Manual for Writers is actually written by them (Turabian died in 1987), so investing in a cheap digital copy of that book will also get you a good summary statement of what used to be in Craft of Research and other books that they’ve written. There are also other books that use the Williams method, such as The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing. Its also very inexpensive as an ebook.

Finally, I will mention one more book: Tara Grey’s Publish and Flourish. Grey runs workshops that developed out of her exposure to both Williams and Boice. The book version of the workshop is not super available now, but I love its small size and boiled-down message. If you don’t want to spring for a new copy, its definitely one to ILL.

There are a million books on how to write out there — especially if count the books on writing fiction! — and as a result the signal gets lost in the noise. But Boice and Williams and their colleagues have written books which describe methods that completely and totally work, and that everybody should follow. Including you.

(there, you see: 1135 words. Now to move on to the rest of my writing for the day)

Yes, the AAA has published books, in fact over thirty of them. In fact, many members of the AAA used it as a publishing platform to publish on topics that were untimely or that university presses were not interested in. This includes important remembrances of pioneering female anthropologists like Sylvia Forman and Eleanor Leacock produced by the Association for Feminist Anthropology, as well as a series of papers on refugees, migrants, and transnationalism.

Sounds like something you’d want to check out, right? Well good luck. These monographs had very small circulation back in the day and are not on nearly as many people’s radar as they should be. It’s a real pity. There is a lovely, short festschrift for Ward Goodenough that is the best available scholarly source on his career. The copy I consulted was under lock and key in my library’s Pacific Collection, so how many other places will get hold of it? Now that Goodenough has passed away, this book is his legacy and it is unavailable. And that’s just one example of the many stories that lie behind these books.

Now, in its own way the AAA is trying to get these books back out to a public readership — by selling them. The most important ones are even being put back in print. But what is the point of bringing these titles back to print? To make money for the AAA? The AAA has a multimillion dollar budget. Is this really going to provide an appreciable source of revenue? I doubt it. Is the purpose to make these works public? In that case, the best thing to do would be to return them to the public domain. And of course if you really feel there is demand for the books, then there’s no reason to stop selling them print on demand even after you share your intellectual property rights to them with everyone else.

And what about the titles that will not go back into print, like the Goodenough festschrift? What about the books that will not come back into print? I understand that a lot of these books are clogging up the closets and drawers of the AAA. But making people pay ten bucks plus shipping and handling to clean out the AAA office in Virginia doesn’t seem fair.

So I have a better idea: release the rights for these books back into the public domain, just as you did the journal articles. You don’t even have to digitize them or anything — we’ll take care of that. And then at the next AAA in Washington bring all the back copies of these books to the book exhibit and given them away for free. You may not maximize your profit (after all the AAA has never been good at doing that), but you’ll be doing the right thing.

To pursue the other option, of commercializing our scholarly work and squeezing it for every last bit of money possible, is merely to demonstrate (again) that the AAA talks the talk on open access, but does not walk the walk. With so little money on the table, surely the AAA book series presents a perfect, low-risk opportunity for the AAA to show that it is committed to doing the right thing.