We were sitting over the remains of dinner in a Village restaurant when the conversation turned to gender and women’s studies.

“I am an –ism person,” Temma Kaplan, Rutgers historian said to me. “I don’t do –ity.”

I gave her a knowing look.

“It used to be all –isms. Now everything is –ities,” she said.

“But you can’t get a job in women’s studies without working on an –ity.” I said, “–ities are the thing these days.”

She sighed and shrugged.

Academese is the secret code that some scholars use to signal that they are members of the club.  It ensures that no one can really tell whether their ideas are brilliant, bad, or merely mediocre.   This is especially useful when submitting an application to a multidisciplinary search or review committee.  Since academics are so narrowly specialized these days, there are probably only a handful of people in the world who can judge whether a project is truly groundbreaking. 

Learning to write like an academic is difficult. If you don’t want to rely solely on the University of Chicago’s academic sentence generator, you too can learn the subtle art of writing impenetrable prose. It takes time and practice, and not an insubstantial amount of creativity, to produce appropriately complex neologisms for otherwise basic concepts.

First, master prefixes and suffixes.  The wrong prefix or suffix use can mark your ideas as passé.  For instance, as Temma Kaplan so astutely noted, -isms are out, and –ities are in.  Words like “postcolonialism,” “modernism,” “materialism” or “feminism,” are so 20th century.  For the new millennium, we have new and improved words like “postcoloniality,” “modernity,” “materiality” and “intersectionality.”  If you must use an -ism, be sure to pluralize it.  No one will hear of a singular “feminism” or “materialism” today; there are only “feminisms” and “materialisms.” 

But you will be au courant if you abandon the –ism and go with the –ity.   The worldview of an individual subject becomes “subjectivity.”  The imposition of certain social norms is “normativity.”  The close reading of literary texts for the influences of previous texts is “intertextuality.”  As with the old -ism, you should probably use these in plural as well: “subjectivities,” “normativities” and “intertextualities.” 

Following these patterns, we can create a lot of interesting new terms.  If I am interested in forms of political or economic oppression, I can talk about “oppressivities” or technologies of “oppressivity.”  Are you studying educational reform?  How about “educativities?”  The study of historical truth claims can become the examination of “historicities.” Interested in how governments rule or in the politics of environmental change?  Then “governmentalities” and “enviromentalities” are for you.  If you are studying how governments affect environmental policy, you can use the fantastic word: “Ecogovernmentalities.”

For prefixes, neo- and post- have largely gone the way of shoulder pads for women’s suits.  These days, bio-, hetero-, homo-, and techno- are the way to go.  Bio-, which derives from “biopolitics” can be used to describe the way states, markets, or technologies regulate and control aspects of human social life: “biosubjectivities,” “biogovernmentalities,” “biointersectionalities,” “bioregionalities,” and “bioalterities” all become possible. 

Hetero- and homo- can be used in a couple of different ways.  These prefixes sometimes refer to hetero- and homo- sexualities as in “heteronormativity” or “homonormativity.”  But hetero- and homo- can also mean “different” and “the same” as in “heterogenous” and “homogenous.” This ambiguity in usage is a gold mine for creating neologisms that prove difficult to interpret.  The term “heterocartographies,” for instance, can mean different ways of mapping space or it can refer to the abstract visualization of where straight people live.  Similarly, “lapine homocopulativity” can refer to how different genera of rabbits form social connections in similar ways or it can mean how homosexual rabbits forge meaningful relationships.

Techno- is a very sexy prefix which can refer to something related to technology or something related to technocracy (i.e. the rule of experts). So words like “technosubjectivity,” “technonormativity,” and “technogovernmentality” are deliciously flexible.

Finally, if you really want to impress people, you can use compound prefixes.  The prefix inter- is very useful in this task. We already have basic inter- words like “intersectionality” and “intertextuality. “ These can be built upon by adding bio- or hetero- for words like “biointersectionalities” or “heterointertextualities.”  Why write about the different types of discrimination that the Roma minority experiences in Bulgaria when instead I can write about “heterointeroppressivities?”  Why examine how they feel about their societal exclusion when I can instead interrogate their “biointersubjectivities?”  If you’re feeling bold, techno- makes a real statement: “technoecoalterities” or “technointerhistoricities.”

Don’t worry if you’re not entirely sure what a term means; with the correct combination of prefixes and suffixes, you will most likely arrive at something that at least appears fashionable, if not profound. When you deploy terminology that might mean any number of different things, you ensure that no one knows exactly what, if anything, you are arguing.

The great benefit of learning to write this way is that even if you never get a grant to fund your research, you will be able to confidently discuss the interbiotechnogovernmentalities of the espresso machine with your fellow Ph.D. baristas at Starbucks.

I did read a post over on Allegra by Isaac Morrison about this whole “ontological turn” thing that makes some good points.  Here’s how it starts:

It’s taken me a while to mentally unpack my experiences from the 2013 AAA conference. The conference itself came at a strange time for me, fresh on the heels of the loss of two close family members and the acquisition of two new jobs.

I bounced from session to session, cursed the Hilton’s Wi-Fi, delivered a workshop, periodically stepped out for work-related phone calls, sat on a panel or two, and indulged in Chicago’s culinary offerings. I collected business cards and passed business cards out. I reconnected with some old acquaintances, made a few new friends, and took copious notes while trying to make sense of a sprawling and diverse agglomeration of oblique specialties and deep knowledge.

Strange oppositions were the order of the day, and the most striking of them was my experience of strolling out of a panel on the importance of public engagement only to overhear a fresh-faced PhD student chirp “Marshal Sahlins is about to beat the crap out of Bruno Latour” while scampering past me on his way to a panel on “the ontological turn”

Now, I’ve had a fondness for ontological self-indulgence since the early 1990s, but all I could think about was the room I had just left full of deer-in-headlights PhD students all wondering where and how they were going to find jobs. The older faculty members on the panel had offered little consolation – they made it clear that failure to secure a full-time academic job wasn’t really a failure anymore, since the full-time academic jobs were vanishing anyway from the US job market and worldwide.

Later, Morrison asks this question: “If somebody asked you, ‘what’s the hot topic in the field of anthropology right now?’ would you be eager to tell them about the ben-wa glass bead game that is the ontological turn?'”

The rest is here.  Please feel free to make your case for or against anthropology and its ontological turn in the comments.

UPDATE 1/27/14: In the comments below, responding to a discussion about the current crisis in academic anthropology, and explaining his understanding of that crisis, Rex wrote: “These are the things that created the crisis we find ourselves in. Not ‘Writing Culture’.”  Here is my extended response to Rex:

I’d argue that the larger political economy of higher ed (and academic anthro) is just part of the issue. A big part, but still just a part. I think the current crisis is also about the kind of anthropology that has taken shape in the last few decades. It’s about what anthropologists do with their concepts, ideas, knowledge. I definitely don’t think it makes sense to blame post-modernism, or “critical theory,” or “Writing Culture” for contributing to the current fix we’re in. To me those are just sets of ideas or knowledge–they don’t “do” anything on their own. I do think, however, that it is fair to talk about the ideas and conversations we fixate upon, where those conversations actually go (via publishing, conferences, etc), how we transmit our values and ideas through training students, and, ultimately, the “anthropologists” and “anthropology” we have produced over the last three decades. I think we, as a discipline, have sort of painted ourselves into a corner–effectively removing ourselves from the public sphere. With noted exceptions. We do this–sometimes–by retreating into our own corners and closed, specialized conversations. I think this withdrawal from public engagement has seriously contributed to our current dilemma. There is a reason why so many people in the US have no clue what we do. It’s not just because they “don’t get it.”

So, overall, my skepticism about the ontology-related excitement isn’t so much about whether or not I find ontology personally useful or relevant. It’s more about whether or not the “ontological turn” fever is just another in a series of inward-looking shifts that further entrenches us in our own little worlds. Sometimes this kind of excitement about a particular body of theory–I think of “theory” as a tool for understanding the world–is akin to photographers who get all worked up about certain camera equipment, and that’s all they talk about. By and large, nobody cares about this but the photographers themselves. Granted, I love a good Leica or 4×5 view camera, but I really don’t want to sit around talking about it all day. It’s the photographs that matter. Sure, the process matters…but it’s important to balance process with practice. I think anthropologists find themselves caught in this trap a little too often. We like to talk shop, a lot.

So if ontology is the next big thing, great. Our challenge is to balance all the excited, insular shop talk with the doing anthropology thing. To me that means taking anthropology out into the world and finding ways to communicate our results, and it also means turning the anthropological eye upon the political and economic systems in which we exist on a day to day basis. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure our wider audiences could care about which tools we’re currently fixated upon. The AAA meetings are a place to have our internal conversations, but they’re also (potentially) a place for initiating deeper public engagement. I, for one, would be excited if our next “big thing” was less about our own conversations and theories, and more about what we’re actually doing with our ideas and methods. At home, and abroad.