Recent reading

[luzula]

Oops, forgot to write this up for a while...a lot of these are short though.

Late in the Day by Ursula K. Le Guin (2015)
Poetry collection that I really enjoyed, it touches a lot on political and other issues I've been reading non-fiction about. But of course very enjoyable on other levels as well--I love her language so much. Recommended!

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology by David Graeber (2004)
This is definitely worth reading! I like how it suggests avenues of possible scholarship/political thinking, but doesn't feel it has to flesh everything out. My thoughts about this book could maybe be a separate post, if I had the time/energy to write it up. But it's interesting how it talks about non-modern societies as arenas of political struggle that we can learn from and be inspired by. Also how groups that are often read as ethnic are often actually political in origin, for example, there's an "ethnic group" on Madagascar who are actually the people who didn't want to live under some authoritarian kingdom, and escaped and founded a more egalitarian society. I do however want to talk back to him when he talks about consensus methods vs voting as decision-making methods. His descriptions of voting as a method (driven by competition, shaming the losers, premised on the threat of violence to subdue the minority) just does not jive with my lived experience in organizations using that method. But I'm happy to discuss it more (probably in some future Skype talk with jesse_the_k).

All Systems Red by Martha Wells (2017)
For my fannish book club. We all enjoyed this, it's just a very readable book (well, novella)!

Return of the Peasant: a history of the world in ten and a half blog posts by Chris Smaje (2017)
The author seems to be a farmer in the UK with a blog who also publishes papers in various journals/magazines? I found this by blog-hopping somehow. He writes about a lot of stuff I find interesting (energy, environment, technology, agriculture, etc) and also his references make my to-read list grow. Obviously the "world history" here is not meant to be comprehensive, just a sort of dive into themes he wants to explore.

The Control of Nature by John McPhee (1989)
Recced by julia_here at some point, I think? It's about epic struggles between mankind and geologic forces, in three sections. I was most captured by the one about the US Army Corps of Engineers vs the Mississippi River, especially because of what it says about the side-effects of that struggle. But the one about Icelanders fighting a volcano eruption is also very captivating! Recommended.

ETA: Oh, and I can also recommend this essay by an archaeologist and an anthropologist about how human prehistorical social organization is more complicated than people previously thought. Specifically, it says that the generalizations "hunting and gathering society = simple, egalitarian organization" and "agricultural society = hierarchical organization" that people often make are not actually true in general. I wish that essay was a book instead.

Comments

[scribe]

oh man you're making me miss my college anthropology reading, I always intend to catch up on what's happening in the field and never manage to.

[luzula]

I've been discovering that there are really interesting anthropology authors lately! So if you were to rec one book in the subject, what would it be? (Well, something reasonably accessible to non-specialists.)

[scribe]

Oh, hmm, what a good question! Off the top of my head, I really enjoyed Ethnicity, Inc by the Comaroffs, which is about commodification and perfomative...ness...of ethnicity and sounds like it might tie into the book you were talking about above, at least partially. Or What It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee by Jonathan Marks, which is about how science is politically driven and we should be wary of it.

(caveat, I remember enjoying these when I was like, 18, so ymmv)

[luzula]

Thanks, I will check them out! : )

[jesse_the_k]

If you enjoy McPhee's prose styling, there's shelves of him to read. Coming Into The Country is perhaps my favorite, since he's simultanrously admiring, chronicling & mocking the back-to-the-land macho-men in 1970s Alaska.

Yes! Let's schedule a post-WisCon Fragments of Anarchist Archeology convo. Catnip for us.

[luzula]

I have read one McPhee before, the one about California, which I read while in California (julia_here gave it to me when I visited on my way down the west coast). Might read more at some point?

That sounds good--just let me know when you have rested up after WisCon!