When signing up for my last semester of classes at Bard, knowing that I needed to take the easiest classes imaginable, I just couldn’t resist Yuka’s Environment, Development, and Power Senior Research Seminar. The reason senior research seminars usually only have about 6-8 students is because any senior in their right mind wouldn’t subject him or herself to the ridiculous reading and writing load while writing the project. But I suppose my six classmates and I were so brain-fried and delirious from our first semester of senior projecting, that we exercised severely poor judgment. Or maybe we just thought seeing Yuka’s sweet, smiling face every week would make it worth it, would make us forget that behind that smile was 400-500 pages of incredibly dense reading every week. I’ve had lit classes with 300-400 pages a week, but we are talking fiction…you know…plot lines.
Needless to say, I NEVER got all my reading done for that class. I took 20 hours all of my semesters at Bard (except for the first…I took 18), so not getting your reading done was a reality that couldn’t really be repaired. It was an adjustment. In high school, I read every single word of assigned reading and then some. It used to drive me crazy when I’d be sitting in on a class where I had finished the damn book and all my classmates were on chapter 3. Sooo frustrating. And all of a sudden, I get to college and spend hours upon hours at the library and still can’t manage to read anything.
But I developed a sort of system. Read the intro, first chapter, and one other chapter (the one with the most interesting title), and then the conclusion. For all other chapters, you read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. I find that doing this makes it possible for you to go into a classroom with a pretty good idea of what the book was about. But in that class, sometimes I couldn’t even find time to read the intro top to bottom. I tried really hard, because EDP was exactly up my alley and was this amazing opportunity to be exposed to what is happening right now in contemporary anthropologies. Most of the writers we were reading were fairly recent graduate (most within the last 7 or 8 years). It’s really an exciting time to be an anthropologist. And I did really well for a while. Then we read Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern which I forced myself to read every last word of and I still can’t tell you what the fuck that book is about. It was translated from the French and it might as well have been French for all the sense it made. It was about pre-modernity and post-modernity and how we have never been modern, that modernity is just another act of faith and how our world requires hybrid modes of thinking…blah blah blah. I kid you not, the book had not a single proper noun in the entire thing…not one. Okay, I understood it a little better than that, but I’m not sure I saw the point. Maybe the translation was just bad. Some of the sentences had a bit of a Bablefish lilt to them.
The reason I just slipped right into history and anthropology from a heavy literature background was because I found the stories. Historiography and Ethnography are stories, crafted and highlighted in ways that create analytical meaning, but deep down, they are just stories. And I love stories. We Have Never Been Modern did not have stories. I can stomach intense theory as long as there are stories to somehow ground it. I even appreciate theory, because theory, when reiterated properly can become taken for granted and then put into practice. But I’m not sure I want to go there and I firmly believe that my broad generation (lets say born after 1970) of scholars must somehow find a way to make our work more organic and more fluid than our predecessors if we are to really make an impact. We have to be willing not only to take risks but to make our findings more accessible. But that’s another story altogether.
The point is, there is a lot of important work being done in anthropology right now, especially surrounding identity politics as they are manifested in critical environmental and rural development issues. And I have a bunch of books sitting on my shelf that haven’t been read properly. I’ve Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Friction: and ethnography of global connection, which we read the week projects were due. I think Yuka was sad. “None of you read this, did you?”
And then there’s In Amazonia: A Natural History by Hugh Raffles, and Suffering for Territory: Race, Place, and Power in Zimbabwe (which I did actually read most but not all of, as it was my week to do a presentation). Anyway, I have lots of reading to do.
I’m going to have to go to Clemson and buy a library card so I can use their library. Maybe they’ll have a decently current anthropology section and a few periodicals of interest. I need to boost my knowledge base so that when I finally get to writing my piece for grad school, I can really show them I know my stuff. I generally disapprove of writing with other academics as your primary audience, but in this case, there is a great deal of money involved. I can be disapproving once I have my stipend. For now, we are going for impressive. I really need to learn how to speak the language. Anthropology is so focused on terminology and I don’t know a lot of it. I read these terms over and over again (neoliberalism, spaciality, political economy, political ecology, etc) and have never really had the time or energy to really find out exactly what they mean.
I think I am going to create a reading system. I tend to have 5 or 6 books floating around at any given time, none of them ever finished.
For example, right now, I literally sleep with these books in my bed (yes, yes, I have no bed partner so I find the next best thing…but my books don’t snore or hog the covers):
Mockingbird by somebody, Harper Lee’s biography….I’m about halfway through. She’s moved to NYC. This couple who kind of adopted her gave her a little envelope for Christmas with a note inside that said they would financially support her financially for a whole year so that she could write TKAM. It was pretty climactic, so I stopped reading. But I was pissed off to begin with because the guy writes in the intro “Harper Lee did not want this book to be written and adamantly refused to speak to me…but I’m writing it anyway because I want to.” I paraphrase, but it was pretty damn presumptuous.
The Essential Agrarian Reader…I’ve read the first 4 essays but honestly they’ve all said the same thing.
The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg (totally wrong spelling, but the books are upstairs and I am here)…I really like this guy and this book, but I feel weird about it, mad at it even. The day before I left for Christmas break, Jennifer got it for me. He was her professor at Harvard. She gave me the book and inside was the infamous $600 dollar gift card to the Strand. I’ve only read the first essay about January. It’s about hay bale twine.
Arthur and George by Julian Barnes…I was reading this before I read People of Paper and now the momentum is gone. But after about 100 pages, I just found out that the little boy Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It’s really fabulous. I’m finishing it next.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban…I can’t help myself. I’m trying to get through them all before Deathly Hallows comes out in July.
Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol…I think I’m too depressed to go on.
See! I have strange bedfellows, indeed.
I think I need to limit myself to 2 at a time, one fiction and one academic…and I can’t move onto another fiction book until the academic one is finished.
And another thought of mine was to start taking advantage of Clemson and Furman when they go back in the fall. I miss lectures.
Speaking of Yuka...turns out she had a baby. It probably came out smiling.
