Tag Archives: Bibliomania

The Road to Published: The Making of an Edited Volume (Part II)

If you haven’t already, read these first: Part I – In which I manage to get a publishing contract

Part Ia: Writing a Prospectus – In which I detail how I wrote my prospectus

You’d think that selling a publisher on your book idea would be the hard part.  Once you have a contract in hand, the rest should be easy, right? After all, in my case, the contributors had already presented their work, so they already had at least a draft to work from — all that’s left is for each person to clean up their draft, maybe expand a piece here and there, and tidy up their references.  Right?

Right?!

Wrong.  You’ve heard the expression “herding cats” before, right? Well, I decided that getting an edited volume put together was a lot like herding glaciers.

What I’m saying is, it goes a bit slowly.

Part of the problem is the academic schedule.  Most academics are bound to a semester-by-semester schedule that a] changes frequently, and b] puts us through periods of intense work interspersed with periods of intense inactivity. During the school session, for all our good intentions, non-teaching projects tend to fall by the wayside.  Some academics are lucky: they have tenure, 1- or 2- class per semester teaching loads, and committee work they’ve learned how to blow off.  Those are not the kind of academics one would expect to find contributing to an edited volume by an unknown grad student.

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The long historical essay as anthropological theory

As the spring semester approaches my fellow hemisphere mates and I, I am putting the final touches on my ‘theory’ syllabus. I’ll share it with SM soon (the initial draft is not very appetizing), but I thought it would be interesting here to blog about something I will not be teaching — the long historical essay. As I’ve mentioned in past posts, anthropologists have come, for some reason, to ‘do theory’ in the form of the disciplinary history. This includes monograph-length studies, of course, but one particular genre that seems particularly anthropological is the long essay in which anthropologists describe ‘their theory’ or a more general ‘world view’ by constructing a genealogy whose telos they are. So in honor of Christmas — which involves its own teleological understanding of my own tradition — I thought I’d try to make a list here of classic ‘long essays’ in anthropological theory. Let me know if you can think of any more:

Blurred Genres, Clifford Geertz
Theory in Anthropology Since The 60s, Sherry Ortner
“As People Express Their Lives, So They Are…” in the Symbolic Anthropology Reader
Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems, Michael Fischer
Anthropos, Edmund Leach
The Use of Anthropology: Critical, Personal, Politics, Dell Hymes

The genre is pretty fuzzy, but I hope this gives readers of these works some sense of what I’m talking about.

I’m not actually assigning any of these essays to my students (they can read them on their own if they want). They are very tricky. Often presentist and self-serving they require very sensitive antenna to read through to get some actual sense of the literature they cover. At the same time working through the motivations of their orchestration of the literature is in itself a good way to get some sense of the scene when the author was writing. But at any rate I think given the limitations of class time it is better to get students to actually read the material rather than read about it. What do you think?

knolcats: i’m in ur pedia, innovatin ur ass

It its never-ending bid to own every inch of your brain, Google has just announced the beginning of its competitor project to Wikipedia. You knew this was coming. You did really, because every time you search for something, you get a Wikipedia page, right? You thought Google wouldn’t notice… There have been some short posts by Esther and Henry at Crooked Timber, and all of us want to hear what Siva will say, since he’s made it his new project to worry about precisely this.

For my part, I find it to be an interesting confirmation that something has changed with respect to innovation on the internet. While it is comforting to suggest that innovation takes place democratically on the Internet because any little guy with an innovation can suddenly become huge and all of a sudden capture billions of eyeballs, or whatever, its pretty clear that Google is turning out to be to the Internet what IBM was to mainframes and Microsoft was to PCs. Which is to say, a monopolist. Only it’s in a totally unregulated environment, where the de facto ideology is that we live in a world of unconstrained free competition; we fool ourselves that this isn’t a monopoly because their tag line is “don’t be evil.”

But in reality, Google didn’t innovate here. There are a bunch of projects that have done what google is proposing to do with “knols” but they don’t have the massive resources and direct access to the most valuable data available that Google has (for instance, my own Rice Universities Connexions project has addressed exactly the issues Google claims that no one else has addressed). But for most net observers, anyone who says “we did that before google did” is just sour grapes… and in an era and an environment in which the intellectual property system is so drastically and so completely broken, it’s impossible to use IP rights to adjudicate who might actually deserve recognition for an idea. The best you can do is assume that if they are 1) bought by Google or 2) bought by Microsoft, they must have had a good idea, and some good lawyers. So I’m not sure how I feel about the new frontier; on the one hand, I, for one, welcome our new knowledge-ecology overlords, on the other hand, it feels to me like we’re on a primrose path towards the Wal-Martization of the Internet, with candy rainbow-colored everything. Or maybe I should just take the blue pill, and stay here, forever.

The Road to Published: The Making of an Edited Volume (Part Ia — Writing a Prospectus)

I was going to save this for Part II, but when I looked back at my prospectus I decided that a deeper exegesis of what I had done might be useful — I know I floundered quite a bit figuring out what a prospectus should look like, what its tone should be, and so on. So here’s a blow-by-blow look at the prospectus I sent to Pluto Books. I’m not saying this is the best proposal ever, or that I didn’t make mistakes, or that I wouldn’t do things differently today — just that this one worked, for whatever that’s worth.

I talked before about the need for a prospectus that really sells your book proposal. As academics, we’re used to writing proposals that highlight ideas, theories, methods — none of which is all that useful in a prospectus. Although an editor is (hopefully) going to be interested in what a book says, that interest has to be subsidiary to what kind of interest the book will generate and how many copies they can sell. Every publisher has a minimum number they need to sell to break even on a book — your prospectus has to convince them that they’ll sell more than whatever that number is.

Here’s the prospectus I sent to Pluto Books in 2005, modified somewhat to remove personal information. Continue reading →

The Road to Published: The Making of an Edited Volume (Part I)

book cover small A few people said they’d like to hear about the process of getting my forthcoming edited volume, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA published. The road has been a long one, almost exactly five years from inception to (planned) publication, so I decided to take a few posts and describe in as much detail as I can recall how I’ve managed this.

This is not intended to be “an expert’s guide to getting published” — in fact, it is presented more as a non-expert’s guide. I’ve had to learn most of this as I went along, and I’m hoping that knowing how I managed to get the project completed might help others like me — first-time academic authors — to navigate the system just a little bit more easily.
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Pluto Press and U. of Michigan Retain Business Ties

I’ve been somewhat absently following the story of U. of Michigan Press’ reconsideration of its relationship with UK-based Pluto Press, since my forthcoming book Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War is being released on Pluto Press and the loss of an American distributor would limit its availability in the country that it most directly deals with.  So it’s with some relief that I see that Michigan has decided to continue its relationship with Pluto Press. 

The issue was set off by Continue reading →

How to read a (good) book in one hour.

I’m teaching a class at Harvard this semester, and was satisfied to discover that even there, students balk at my tendency to assign what seem like humanly impossible amounts of reading for class. Because I basically just want everyone to like me, I frequently backpedal on this otherwise gratuitous display of pedagogical power. I do however, intend for students to read the books I assign, and because I am myself an incredibly slow reader, I sympathize with my students, especially when I assign things I haven’t read and I think: now why did I do that? But I also find that it helps to make explicit what I mean by “read.” For this purpose I have frequently relied on Paul Edwards excellent handout, “How to Read,” which counsels that one can read a book in 6-8 hrs. I’m upping the ante, though, because I think you can read a book in one hour and gain a reasonably good sense of the argument, stakes and main areas of investigation, even if the details elude you. Here ‘s my snake-oil, use only as directed, and I disclaim all warranties, implied or expressed.
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Movies, Race, and Ethnicity

The last time I taught the course Indigenous Images it was a two hour class which meant that there was no time to show movies. This time around I got a four hour slot, so there will be plenty of time to show a film every week and still have some good discussion. But that means I need to pick films and find good readings to go with them, so I was really happy to find this excellent resource: The UC Berkeley Media Resources Center has put up an extensive set of bibliographies and videographies relating to Movies, Race, and Ethnicity. For my course, I’m particularly interested in the material on Native Americans (books, videos), which has already given me some great ideas for my course.

Mapping Friction

I recently noticed that Google Books has a cool new feature where (for some books) it will show you a map of places named in the book. I thought it would be good to test it out on a book about globalization, and so I tried Anna Tsing’s Friction, which we discussed last summer. Sure enough, they have a great map of places mentioned in the book:

friction-map

On the Google Book page you can click on the red tabs and get a relevant excerpt from the book. I think this is a really nifty feature. One can always look up place names in a book’s index, but it is another thing to see them on a map. The service is still a little rough around the edges (most of the US locations mark publishers listed in the bibliography), but I think it has a lot of potential to turn into a truly useful tool for scholars.

WorldCat Identities

I’m really enjoying the “Identities” page on WorldCat. As you might remember, back in 2003 the library service opened up its records to the web (previously only those at subscribing libraries could see the results). I never noticed it before, but their Identities service pulls together lots of useful information about well known people, such as what the most popular works about them are, names of related people, etc.

I really like the “publication timeline” which shows how many works by and about the author were published in each year (also differentiating between works they published while living and posthumous publications). Here is the chart for Clifford Geertz:

Publication Timeline for Geertz (via WolrdCat)

And here is their tag-cloud for the top American anthropologists by number of holdings in libraries:

Top Anthropologists-USA (worldcat)

The service is still in beta, but as it grows I can see it being an excellent supplement to Google Books and Wikipedia, especially for getting a handle on a new author you might never have heard of.

For your reference, here are the pages for Lévi-Strauss and Franz Boas. (It would be nice to see a cleaner permalink structure for linking to individual entries.)

(Thanks to Ilya for letting me know about Identities. He also links to this blog entry by one of the developers.)

In Papua New Guinea’s Asaro Valley

The Valley

The village I have returned to several times beginning in 1998, Pikosa, seems idyllic, but not because it is quaint or edenic. It is nestled at the base of towering blue mountains, next to a river named Rambanunga, a tributary of the Asaro that eventually joins the waters of the Wahgi, Tua, and Bena rivers as they wind toward the great Purari and thus to the Coral Sea, far to the south. Rambanunga is a small river full of big smooth rocks and deep pools for swimming and fishing – small, but it can become quite rapid with heavy rains, sometimes even impassable, and villagers call their pigs home during such storms for fear that they will be swept away in a rapid current.

Stones

People bathe in the river and wash their clothes there, so it has designated areas for men to use and those for women. Men and boys bathe upstream from women and girls, preserving a chaste and non-pollutive separation of the sexes. Rambanunga’s waters are quite frigid, and though Pikosans find the cold water refreshing, I found it bracing as I shivered through Sunday morning (pre-church) baths to the laughter of those bathing with me. There are spits of gravel and sand that interrupt Rambanunga’s flow, and one of these is a recreational spot for the men of the village. They gather there on occasion to stage small afternoon feasts, washing themselves and their clothes, gambling at cards, sunning themselves on huge stones, smoking marijuana and cigarettes. They call it – in English – “naked beach.” Continue reading →

WritingBloggingWritingReading

I’ve been following the projects at the Institute for the future of the book, including MacKenzie Wark’s new Gamer Theory project, and a project by journalism professor Micthell Stephens about ancient Rome. Both projects are great from the perspective of experimental interfaces– very clever about the problems of careful call and response on scholarly texts (as opposed to the post + comments model of the blog). I’m not sure either are as interesting content-wise as they are interface-wise, but that’s frequently the difficulty with new media experiments… worth checking out in any case.

2006: A very good year for Melanesianists

It is probably too early for us to begin discussing ‘best of’ lists, new years style, for anthropology in 2006. But since Strong mentioned Paige West’s book in his previous post on “the San Jose AAAs”:/2006/11/27/aaa-2006-late-observations/ I thought now would be a good point to mention what a banner year this was for anthropology in Papua New Guinea.

People who study Papua New Guinea love to kvetch that they’re misunderstood, that people assume that Melanesianists are obsessed with ‘exotic’ and ‘savage’ people, that the field’s image of Papua New Guinea was dipped in lucite in in the 1920s when Argonauts came out, and so forth. We worry that no one wants to publish books about Melanesia and that our discipline is in decline. I personally think a lot of these fears are overblown — as this years publications prove. In the past 12 months we’ve seen the publication of:

  • “Reverse Anthropolgy”:http://www.amazon.com/Reverse-Anthropology-Indigenous-Environmental-Relations/dp/0804753423/sr=8-1/qid=1164963153/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books by Stuart Kirsch, published by Stanford
  • “Wayward Women”:http://www.amazon.com/Wayward-Women-Sexuality-Agency-Society/dp/0520245601/sr=8-2/qid=1164963170/ref=sr_1_2/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books by Holly Wardlow, published by California
  • “Conservation Is Our Goverment Now”:http://www.amazon.com/Conservation-Our-Government-Now-Twenty-First/dp/0822337495/sr=8-1/qid=1164963187/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books by Paige West, published by Duke
  • “The Meaning of Whitemen”:http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Whitemen-Modernity-Orokaiva-Cultural/dp/0226038912/sr=8-1/qid=1164963201/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8&s=books by Ira Bashkow, published by Chicago

Four great ethnographies of Papua New Guinea (I really do recommend them all to you) published by four of the most prestiguous academic presses around today. What does this tell us about the state of our disciplie? I lot, I’d say.
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Open Access Austronesians

The Comparative Austronesian Project at the Australian National Universe has released “a whole series of its books”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/titles/austronesians.htm online as open access resources at the “ANU’s cutting-edge Epress”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/. Those of you up to your neck in All Things Austronesian know that there are viewpoints on Austronesia other than those of “Peter Bellwood”:http://rspas.anu.edu.au/people/personal/bellp_anh.php, one of the main people involved in the project. That said, it is hard to turn down volumes edited by people like Bellwood, James Fox, and Cliff Sather. My favorite, “Sharing The Earth, Dividing The Land”:http://epress.anu.edu.au/sharing_citation.htm is particularly relevant for my own work on indigenous land tenure and features artices on the concepty of -honua- fonua in Tonga and a piece by Mark “Chaos Theory”:http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=MoskoOrder Mosko on Mekeo.