Back in the old country after a full and challenging year. In honour of the switch to the southern hemisphere, the list returns to it’s original Summer title. There’s a lot of ‘funny’ this year. Lucky you! I’ve decided to put an asterisk next to pieces that I especially liked for those who prefer a slimmer list.

Academia

• Commuting: a life sentence for academics
• This Is How You Kill a Profession
• What is the point of a university press?

Anthropology/ethnography

• The Momo signal
• Who Is John Frum?
• How Many Bones Would You Break to Get Laid?
• Courtney Adamo, Amelia Fullarton, and Other Instagram Influencer Mamas Are Living the Dream in Byron Bay
• How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity
• *Do human beings have an instinct for waging war? – David P Barash | Aeon Essays  (Nice take on how ethnography is abused to make universalising claims)
• Why Symbols Aren’t Forever – Issue 76: Language – Nautilus

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I’ve finally had a good look at Jean-François Champollion’s 1824 Précis, the book in which he lays out his famous decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Of course, I didn’t read every last sentence of its 588 pages, and I’m even surprised that I got through its full title: Précis du système hiéroglyphique des anciens égyptiens, ou, Recherche sur les éléments premiers de cette écriture sacrée.

But I did get a sense of his achievement, including the rivalry with other contemporary Egyptologists such as Thomas Young, and his fine attention to detail witnessed especially in the beautiful concordance tables of hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts:

As someone who is absolutely not an Egyptologist, I was also quite happy to learn a few stray things along the way. For example, that the Rosetta stone did not provide an instant skeleton key to unravel the mystery, as popularly supposed. Continue reading →

Welcome to the Winter Syllabus 2017, a collection of articles and commentaries that captured my attention. (See also 2016, 2015, 2014.) I use the term ‘journalism’ loosely.

Standard disclaimer: This is not a list of ‘likes’ nor is it a recommendation for what ought to be read or which deserves exposure—that list would be endless and also meaningless.

If you’re only going to read a few of these, the ones that have stayed with me the most are Virginia Heffernan’s The Internet Is the Uncanniest Valley. Don’t Get Trapped in It, Kevin Kelly’s The Myth of a Superhuman AI, and Claire Dederer’s What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?. Maybe the funniest was Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Buzzfeed Article, but there were so many funnies this year. I guess we all needed it.

Academia

• Workload survival guide for academics
• Academic labour markets in Europe vary widely in openness and job security
• Science first, scientists later
• Academia is now incompatible with family life, thanks to casual contracts
• The “Crazy/Bitch” Narrative About Senior Academic Women
• The dark arts of academia and why journals must do more to tackle the problem
• Sixteen years in academia made me an a-hole
• Darwin Was a Slacker and You Should Be Too – Issue 46: Balance – Nautilus
• Sixteen years in academia made me an a-hole

America

• The Human Cost of the Ghost Economy
• Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream
• The First White President
• Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump
• On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of America’s New Right
• 4chan: The Skeleton Key to the Rise of Trump
• America’s New Resistance
• How to Build an Autocracy

Anthropology/Ethnography

• What the idea of civilisational ‘collapse’ says about history
• Appalachian Wrestling’s Greatest Villain: ‘The Progressive Liberal’
• The Lost City That’s Not Lost
• White Men
• My month with chemtrails conspiracy theorists
• Searching for California’s lost Viking treasure ship

Ethics and the examined life

• The secret to office happiness isn’t working less, it’s caring less
• Is the world really better than ever?
• The ultimate case against using shame as a management tactic
• The Wisdom of No Escape
• LOVE IN THE 21ST CENTURY; Against Love
• Ask Polly: Men Are the Worst, and I’m Married to One!
• On Optimism and Despair
• What’s wrong with infidelity?
• Self-Control Is Just Empathy With Your Future Self

Feminism

• The Consent of the (Un)governed
• Rebecca Solnit: if I were a man
• How Men Like Harvey Weinstein Implicate Their Victims in Their Acts

Funny

• Let’s Get Drinks
• Seeking Idea-Oriented Business Multi-Professional to Localize Metrics-Enlarged Dreamscape Stratagems
• Lobsters, Fajitas, Sex Toys, and More: The Best and Weirdest Heists of 2017
• Listen Up, Bitches: It’s Lysistrata Time!
• ‘The Only Difference Between Humans And Chimps Is That Humans Made The Sopranos’: 5 Questions With Jane Goodall
• Hell Yes, Baby, It Is The Special Choo-Choo Medicine Called Coal! The Patriotic Vegetable That Comes From Mountains!!! 
• List: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Buzzfeed Article
• Trump Got To Sit In A Big Boy Truck Because Today Was A Special Day!

History

• Synthetic Fabrics Inspired a Cultural Revolution
• Frances Gabe, Creator of the Only Self-Cleaning Home, Dies at 101
• Sock Puppets and Cult Leaders: The False Prophet Alexander
• What was Christmas like in Nazi Germany?

Kids

• Welcome to the Lucid Nightmare of Toddler YouTube 

Language

• How the Appetite for Emojis Complicates the Effort to Standardize the World’s Alphabets
• Why is linguistics such a magnet for dilettantes and crackpots?
• Arabic Words Illustrated Based On Their Literal Meaning
• Linguists have been discussing “Shit Gibbon.” I argue it’s not entirely about gibbons.

Sex

• The Last Days of the Leather Fortress | Hazlitt
• Why Happy People Cheat
• Opinion | Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism
• The Nightwalker and the Nocturnal Picaresque
• Melissa Broder: Thoughts On Open Marriage and Illness

Technology

• Something is wrong on the internet
• John Lanchester: You Are the Product: It Zucks!
• The Internet Is the Uncanniest Valley. Don’t Get Trapped in It

Politics

• Intersectional Identity and the Path to Progress
• The Moon Is Full of Money – Issue 52: The Hive – Nautilus
• Lack of character in Canberra analysis
• Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice
• The Rise of the Thought Leader
• The age of banter
• Alt-wrong
• How Liberals Fell In Love With The West Wing | Current Affairs
• This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like
• Outsmarted
• This is how we take back control: from the bottom up | George Monbiot
• Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes | Laurie Penny
• A debate over identity politics, with Mark Lilla

Science

• How Information Got Re-Invented – Issue 51: Limits – Nautilus
• Chaos Makes the Multiverse Unnecessary – Issue 49: The Absurd – Nautilus
• The Fly in the Primordial Soup – Issue 50: Emergence – Nautilus
• The Myth of a Superhuman AI – Backchannel
• If You Think You’re a Genius, You’re Crazy – Issue 46: Balance – Nautilus
• The Coin Toss and the Love Triangle – Issue 44: Luck – Nautilus

Writing & writers

• ‘Cat Person’
• What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?
• “A Love Story”
• Hermann Hesse on the Three Types of Readers and Why the Most Transcendent Form of Reading Is Non-reading
• How TV Became Respectable Without Getting Better | Current Affairs
• Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? – Issue 47: Consciousness – Nautilus
• How I won the War of the Pie single-handed
• George Saunders: what writers really do when they write
• Writing and identity

Most overrated crap

I should have started this sub-list earlier because I think it’s important to keep track of articles that seemed to be shared all over the place for no good reason. I won’t link to them since you will need no help finding them.

Number one goes to John Pilger’s ‘Terror in Britain: What did the Prime Minister know?” Nobody has been able to explain to me why a long-winded conspiracy theorist with a bromance for Putin and Assange has such a passionate following on the left. This piece, circulated earnestly on AASNet and elsewhere, is an utter train wreck of bollocks.

Second prize goes to Dan Kopf’s ‘The new, nearly invisible class markers that separate the American elite from everyone else’. All you need to do is imagine somebody who never did an undergraduate arts degree independently discovering the concepts of class and consumption and being blown away by their own insight.

[How I made this (a note to self). Favourite articles were archived using instapaper and then downloaded as html via the settings page]

This blog is rarely updated! If you want an email notification whenever there is a new post, click on the follow button right at the top ↑ that looks like this:  

Welcome to the Winter Syllabus™ for 2016. I’ve gone with ‘Winter’ this time, in honour of my change in hemispheres.

A very interesting year in digital journalism. I loved Nieman Lab for its commentary on journalism, Quartz for being consistently good, Shortlist Daily was masterful, Reductress was hilarious and even Meanjin was no longer crap (just in time to lose its funding). And through it all, Apple News continues to suck as if trying its hardest to be terrible.

Laurie Penny pictured here being younger and more talented than you

Some stand out pieces for 2016 are ‘Fear of a feminist future‘ by Laurie Penny in The Baffler, ‘Get mad and get even‘ by Eleanor Robertson in Meanjin, ‘The arrangements‘ by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie in The New York Times (though it was perhaps more poignant before the Turd Astroid hit the US), ‘Uncanny valley‘ by Anna Wiener in N+1, and the ‘Voyeur’s Motel‘ by Gay Talese in The New Yorker. And one more, because I can’t help myself: ‘The Unbelievable tale of Jesus’s wife‘, by Ariel Sabar in The Atlantic. 

Continue reading →

I have a habit of telling everybody what I’m reading online, but not so much about what I’m reading for research. Here is a short list of books and papers that I’ve come across over the last ten years and that I consider to be personal landmarks for one reason or another.

Looking back over the list, I’m almost disappointed in myself. If I was really out to impress others I would have added lots of monumental tomes staking out various important paradigm shifts and intellectual turns and been more attentive to diversity.

But that wasn’t the aim of the exercise. Texts are listed here because the authors have influenced my thinking in some way, or presented a Big Idea that has captured my imagination, or they may simply have an engaging writing style that has sucked me in despite making poor arguments for which I have decided to forgive them.

These are all the works that I can think of off the top of my head. I will update this post as I think of more.

Continue reading →

When I was new to anthropology I really wanted some kind of ‘best of’ list of ethnographies to get me started. For the most part when I asked anthropologists to tell what work had influenced them the most, they had to stop and think about it or they gave equivocal answers.

So I’m pleased to circulate a recently drafted ‘best of’ list produced by anthropology students at the Australian National University. I am not endorsing the list, but simply making it available. ( If you’re curious to know what my favourite ethnographies are, see this post here.)

It’s encouraging that so many were published in the last fifteen years. Perhaps this is a sign of intellectual progress and generational change within the discipline.

Here it is, with thanks to Shiori Shakuto and the Anthropgrad list:

Abu-Lughod, Lila 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honour and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Allison, Anne 1994. Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Anderson, Benedict 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

Bourgois, Phillipe 2002. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Cambridge University Press.

Bourgois, Phillipe and Schonberg, Jeffrey 2009. Righteous Dopefiend. University of California Press.

Casaro, M Christina 2007. ‘Polo, Laughman, So Say: Situating Uyghur Food between Central Asia and China’. In Beller-Hann et al (eds) Situating the Uyghurs between China and Central Asia. Ashgate.

Gammeltoft, Tine 2014. Haunting Images: A Cultural Account of Selective Reproduction in Vietnam. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Golub, Alex 2014. Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea. Duke University Press.

Gordillo, Gaston R. 2014. Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Duke University Press.

Graeber, David 2009. Direct Action: An Ethnography. AK Press.

Gupta, Akhil 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Duke University Press.

Ho, Karen 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ingold, Tim 2007. Lines: A Brief History. Routledge.

Kohn, Eduardo 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley, University of California Press.

Lea, Tess 2008. Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia. UNSW Press.

Lora-Wainwright, Anna 2013. Fighting for Breath: Living Morally and Dying of Cancer in a Chinese Village. University of Hawaii Press.

Margold, Jane 1995. ‘Narratives of Masculinity and Transnational Migration: Filipino Workers in the Middle East’. In Ong, Aihwa and Peletz, Michael (eds). Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. University of California Press.

Messick, Brinkley 1996. The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society. University of California Press.

Miller, Daniel 2008. The Comfort of Things. Polity Press.

Mueggler, Erik. 2001. The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China. Uiversity of California Press.

Najmabadi, Afsaneh 2013. Professing Selves: Transsexuality and Same-sex Desire in Contemporary Iran. Durham, Duke University Press.

Paxson, Heather 2013. The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 1992. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Trawick, Margaret 1992. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. University of California Press.

Tsing, Anna Lawenhaupt 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press.

Turner, Victor 1970. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Vankatesh, Sudhir 2014. Floating City: A Rogue Sociologist Lost and Found in New York’s Underground Economy. Penguin Press.

Wacquant, Loic, 2007. Body & Soul: Notebooks of an Apprentice Boxer. Oxford University Press.

Wardlow, Holly 2006. Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society. University of California Press.

I’ve often thought that the very worst clichés beloved of highschool English teachers are ‘Write from your experience’, followed closely by, ‘An argument always has two sides’. This is the perfect one-two punch: stifle the imagination then stamp out any residual feeling for nuance. Of course, there is nothing wrong with writing about what you know, and occasionally arguments do have two sides as opposed to three or seventy or just one. The problem arises when these ideas are formalised into ethical principles.

Against this, a recent article by Aminatta Forna is the best defence of the imagination that I have read in years. It also serves as a literary rebuke to the politics of identity taken to extremes, where well-meaning efforts to be ‘inclusive’ of minority perspectives and create ‘safe’ discourses end up essentialising those perspectives to the point where individual experience is erased. I’m going to quote from it below, but go and read the whole thing if you have time.

Some years ago I was invited to speak at Oxford University, and I was perhaps naively surprised to find my book taught by the African studies department and nobody from the department of English literature in attendance at my talk. Everyone in the audience was an Africanist.

[…]

All this classifying, it seems to me, is the very antithesis of literature. The way of literature is to seek universality. Writers try to reach beyond those things that divide us: culture, class, gender, race. Given the chance, we would resist classification. I have never met a writer who wishes to be described as a female writer, gay writer, black writer, Asian writer or African writer. We hyphenated writers complain about the privilege accorded to the white male writer, he who dominates the western canon and is the only one called simply “writer”.

[…]

So where should a bookshop shelve a novel set in Croatia and written in English by a Scottish Sierra Leonian author? Over the years I have posed the question of classification to many writers about their own work and the answer is invariably the same: in bookshops, fiction should be arranged in alphabetical order.

[…]

Writers do not write about places, they write about people who happen to live in those places. This is something that the labellers and their labels don’t understand either. Achebe did not “write about” Africa, he wrote about people who happen to live in Igboland. Likewise, I do not “write about” Sierra Leone or Croatia, those places are the settings for my characters.

[…]

The Pakistani-British writer Kamila Shamsie, whose novel Burnt Shadows featured a Japanese character, agreed: “It’s about authenticity. When I was at uni in America in the 90s there was a lot of criticism around the idea of ‘appropriating’ other people’s stories. What started as a thoughtful post-colonial critique of certain types of imperial texts somehow became a peculiar orthodoxy that essentially denies the possibility of imaginative engagement with anyone outside your little circle.”

[…]

At question time a woman raised her hand and asked how I felt about writing characters “who have experiences different from your own”. I answered that all my characters had experiences different from my own and though it was generally assumed by western critics that I had a great deal in common with my west African characters, I had never in fact been an 80-year-old peasant woman, a university dean or a surgeon. I remarked that while this kind of anxiety seemed to focus on writing outside one’s own ethnicity or gender, class was often overlooked and by far the most challenging in my experience. My male characters were for the most part middle class and middle-aged, like me, but to write a peasant woman born at the turn of the century, to imagine what it might be like never to have read a book or seen a film, I found the toughest act of all.

[…]

A novel is a work of imagination, it is not a dissertation. When a writer writes a book, he or she makes a pact with the reader. For a writer of non-fiction the contract is clear. The author pertains to objectivity. The reader may rely on the facts contained therein, the writer promises (to the best of their ability) to provide a factual truth. A writer of fiction makes no such promises. Fiction is subjective: it comes from within the writer, and, not only that, the story itself is composed of a sequence of lies. The writer of fiction says to the reader only this: come with me on a journey of the imagination and I will try to show you something you have not seen before. This is the gift of the writer to the reader. The reader’s gift is to bring to this alchemy their own imagination and their own experiences.

Her article puts me in mind of the outrageous art of Yinka Shonibare, who was once advised at the beginning of his career to take inspiration from his ‘own culture’. Largely raised in a British context Shonibare began draping his work in bright Dutch-manufactured African textiles. My favourite sculpture of his is ‘How to blow up two heads at once’ (2006):

There is always something dangerous about the art and its capacity for subversion and ambiguity. To foreground Shonibare as ‘Nigerian’, ‘British’ or ‘disabled’ (he is all of those things) strikes me as exercise in making his work intelligible, controllable and ultimately less exciting.

The value of Roland Barthes’ manifesto ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967) was that it provided a timely corrective to a culture in which writers were given full authority on the ‘true’ interpretation of their work, a tradition that lives on in boring Writers Festival questions like “So how much of yourself did you put into your characters?”.

That is not to say that the author’s experience is irrelevant, it’s just that any interpretation that treats biography as the primary frame of reference is putting the cart before the horse. There is an implication that we enlightened consumers of art can somehow know the contours of the artist’s experience ahead of schedule by extrapolating from the categories we ourselves assigned to them. The author is alive and kicking. It’s our idea of what it means to be an author that needs to die.

On the other hand, I’m not willing to take Forna’s ideal of the transcendant imagination at face value. One of the things I love about the New Philology is that it brings good old ethnography back into textual criticism. If, after all, an anthropologist is obliged to ask basket weavers in Central America about their experience and sources of inspiration, then why can’t don’t we ask Salman Rushdie, or indeed Aminatta Forna? Books, like baskets and sandwiches, are also cultural artefacts produced by people with intention. Ultimately this means that authors deserve to have the particularities of their experience recognised but it also means that they cannot be absolved of responsibility when they use their imaginations to inhabit the experience of others. Thomas Kenneally said that if he were to write The chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972)  today he would not have been so presumptuous to write it from an Aboriginal perspective. This is both a political and an aesthetic decision. To ventriloquise and exoticise does not always necessarily make you a ‘bad person’. It does make you bad at imagining.

The imagination is not a transcendent space, but perhaps its necessary to believe that in order to write at all. As Forna put it to her students: write what you want but write it well.

I have been reflecting recently that research academics are in a similar predicament to musicians: there is no ‘middle class’ for either group. Either you are part of the majority struggling at the bottom from gig to gig, or you are straight-up famous.

Of course, there are significant differences too. Musicians are mostly operating in a market economy, while research is still largely done within a patronage model. But it’s clear that academia is becoming more market-based with the end of permanent positions coinciding with weird innovations like crowd-funded research and three-minute presentations. We are increasingly expected to be spruikers of our own brand and to perform labour in exchange for social capital as opposed to, you know, grubby old money. (Read especially everything by Sarah Kendzior on the adjunct crisis as well as relevant readings listed towards the bottom of this post).

There are no doubt problems with the old model as well as potential advantages with the new. Patronage offers security and dignity but had a funny way of institutionalising anti-meritocratic hierarchies. (Among other things, late-career researchers are almost exclusively male, and not always as productive and collaborative as might be hoped.) The neoliberal academy, on the other hand, is at least closer in its structure to the ‘real world’, meaning that if we want to change the way things are going we can count on having allies in other industries who feel our pain. They may even have the imagination to suggest ways of doing things that didn’t occur to us.

Above all, an accurate diagnosis of our situation as researchers—and our particular place within a wider context of social and industrial change—is certainly going to be more important than justified-but-futile whingeing. We don’t have to accept the status quo, but we are obliged to understand it.

This brings me to a fantastic article that appeared in The Atlantic recently: William Deresiewicz’s insightful and non-ranty,  ‘The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur‘. Lot’s of parallels here to the research sector.

Professionalism represents a compromise formation, midway between the sacred and the secular. A profession is not a vocation, in the older sense of a “calling,” but it also isn’t just a job; something of the priestly clings to it. Against the values of the market, the artist, like other professionals, maintained a countervailing set of standards and ideals—beauty, rigor, truth—inherited from the previous paradigm. Institutions served to mediate the difference, to cushion artists, ideologically, economically, and psychologically, from the full force of the marketplace.

[…]

The institutions that have undergirded the existing system are contracting or disintegrating. Professors are becoming adjuncts. Employees are becoming independent contractors (or unpaid interns). Everyone is in a budget squeeze: downsizing, outsourcing, merging, or collapsing. Now we’re all supposed to be our own boss, our own business: our own agent; our own label; our own marketing, production, and accounting departments. Entrepreneurialism is being sold to us as an opportunity. It is, by and large, a necessity. Everybody understands by now that nobody can count on a job.

Still, it also is an opportunity.