This alone seems enough to inflame one set of critics who seem to regard it as both heretical and superficial to refuse to pursue generalized, sweeping conclusions and universally valid principles that arise out of empirical data. So this, in fact, seems to me the “big book” that we need an anthropologist or historian to write, aimed at the same audiences that read Diamond, Pinker, E.O. Wilson, Haidt and other sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, neurobiologists and “big history” writers who offer strong universalizing or generalizing accounts of all cultures and societies across space and time. What we need is someone who can write a big book about why the most interesting things to say about human cultures are particular, local and contingent.

That book would have to avoid falling into the trap of being the straw man that Pinker in particular loves to hit over the head. It would need to start by saying that of course there are transhistorical, universal truths about human biology and minds and the physical constraints of environment and evolution. “Nature” matters, it’s real, it’s important. And equally of course, there are institutions which have persistent force across time and space either because human beings carry those institutions with them and reproduce them in new settings, or because there really are functional, practical problems which arise repeatedly in human societies.

A preference for local, situated, grounded studies does not require a blanket rejection of the biological, material or functional dimensions of human history and experience. What I think the “big book” could say is two major things:

1) that many forms of generalizing social science make far stronger claims that they are factually and empirically entitled to make, and that this problem gets much worse when the generalization is meant to describe not just all existing societies but all of human history.

2) that much generalizing or universalizing social science uses a description of foundational or initial conditions of social and cultural life as if it were also a description of particular, detailed experience and thereby misses both what is interesting and important about the detailed variations between different places and times–which includes the fact that there should be details in the first place. Essentially, that strongly generalized accounts of all human history are making a big deal out of the most obvious and least interesting aspects of human existence.

The first point is simpler, but should command far more respect among scholars and intellectuals who describe themselves as scientists and empiricists than it seems to. I’m going to focus on it for the remainder of this essay and take up the second point another day.

Let me use the example of “stages” of world history, which comes up prominently in Diamond’s new book, primarily as an assertion that there are “traditional” societies that reflect an original or early stage of human history and “modern societies”, with everything presumably arranged neatly in between them. (Diamond is not much interested in his new book in the in-between, and actually has never really been interested in it–Guns, Germs and Steel more or less argues that the early migration and development of human societies across the planet has determined all later histories in a directly symmetrical fashion.)

Most contemporary anthropologists and historians react negatively when they come across an account that tries to arrange human societies along a single spectrum of evolutionary change. To some extent, that reaction is conditioned by the historical use of such characterizations to justify Western racism and colonialism. But even accounts of evolutionary stages of human history that scrupulously avoid those associations are factually troubled.

What’s the issue? Let’s take a point that crops up in Diamond, in Napoleon Chagnon’s work and in a number of other sociobiological and evolutionary-psychology accounts of human variation.

If someone says, “Many human societies practice some form of warfare” or “organized violence is common in most human societies”, that’s fine. The anthropologist or historian who pushes back on that simple generalization is just being a tendentious jerk. Sure, it begs the question of what “warfare” is, but the generalization is so gentle that there’s plenty of space to work out what “many” and “warfare” mean.

Step up a notch, “All human societies practice some form of warfare”. This kind of generalization is easy to break, and it is frustrating when someone making a generalization of this kind digs in their heels to defend it. It’s really only defensible as an icebreaker in a conversation about the phenemenon in question. It can only hold as an airtight assertion if “warfare” is defined so generally that it includes everything from World War II to a football game.

Refine it a step using an evolutionary schema: “All human societies once practiced some form of warfare, but warfare grew into a more rarified, restricted and directed phenomenon as states grew in scale and organizational sophistication.” This sounds like it’s being more careful than the “all human societies practice” generalization but in fact it is even easier to break, because it rests on a linear account of the history of the state (and then a linear account of warfare’s relationship to that history). This is simply not true: human political institutions across time and space have all sorts of variations and really haven’t moved progressively towards a single form or norm until the exceptionally recent past. Even now there are some striking variations at a global scale–and it’s equally clear now that Fukuyama’s End of History assertion that liberal democracy is the final stage of human political evolution is just plain wrong. Beyond the present moment lies the unknown as far as political structures and practices go.

You can break the general assertion not just by citing endless examples of political structures that don’t fit neatly between “traditional” and “modern” societies or endless examples of “warfare” with non-linear relationships to changing political structure over time. You can also break it at the end that Diamond and Chagnon focus on, in the assertion that “traditional societies” in recent history are unchanged survivals, a window into the distant past. There’s increasing evidence, for example, that there have been a succession of large-scale polities in the Amazonian rainforest and the eastern Andes over a very long period of time that simply happened to be absent or weak at the time that Europeans first pushed into these areas. Assuming that small-scale societies of various kinds in the same region where such a history unfolded were unchanging, pristine and unrelated to other societies is at the very least unsupported by any direct evidence. More to the point, such an assumption actively overlooks evidence in many cases in the modern world that “pristine” societies of this type live where they live because they were trying to get away from larger or more centralized polities, that there is a dynamic relationship between them. Which surely includes ideas and practices of violence and warfare.

This is where the use of evolution as the organizing idea of such accounts is so aggravating. Not because it’s “scientific” but because it’s not. Evolutionary biologists know better than to describe speciation as progress towards an end or a goal, to assume that natural selection must always produce more complex or sophisticated organisms over time, or that evolutionary processes should ever be represented by a single line of descent. Go ahead, show an evolutionary biologist a single line that goes from Devonian tetrapods to homo sapiens with every ‘transitional’ animal in between neatly marked as one more interval on the way to us and get ready for a big eyeroll and an exasperated sigh.

Sure, there’s a successive relationship over time between forms of political organization in human history, but if you were going to chart it, you’d have something that looked hugely bushy, with all sorts of groupings, thousands of radial and convergent movements at all scales of time. And if you tried to place “warfare” in relationship to that complexity it would get even messier and more intricate.

Anything that arranges human history as a matter of “stages” progressing neatly towards the modern is just factually wrong before we ever get to the troubled instrumental and ideological history of such schema. Yes, that includes most versions of dialectical materialism: the dogged attempts of some Marxist historians and anthropologists in the 1970s and 1980s to get everything before 1500 into some kind of clear dialectical schema long since crashed into either an assertion that there’s only been one general world-systemic polity ever in human history (the “5,000 year-old world system”) or that lots of variant premodern histories collapsed into a single capitalist world-system after 1500.

When scholars who see politics or culture or warfare or many other phenomena in granular and variable terms rise to object to strong generalizing or universalizing accounts, their first motive is an empirical one: it just isn’t like that. Human political structures didn’t ALL go from “simple tribes” to “early states” to “feudalism” to “absolutist centralization” to “nation-states” to “modern global society”. They didn’t even go that way in Western Europe, really. Certain kinds of structures or practices appeared early in human history, sure, and then recurred because they radiated out from some originating site of practice or because of parallel genesis in relationship to common material and sociobiological dimensions of human life. Other common structures and practices appeared later, sometimes because new technological or economic practices allow for new scales or forms of political life and structure. But there is a huge amount of variation that is poorly described by a linear relation. There are movements between large and small, hierarchical and flat, organized and anarchic, imperial and national, etc., which are not linear at all but cyclical or amorphous.

That’s the “big idea” that people with their eye on variation and particularism could try to sell more aggressively: that the stronger your generalizations and universalisms about human culture and societies are, the more likely they are to be just plain wrong, factually and empirically wrong, and that the only way to dodge that wrongness to sustain those generalizations is to cherrypick your examples and characterize anyone who calls you on it as a pedant or ideologue.

I appreciate that Collapse is, in a way that I find awkward and roundabout, trying to think about the question of determinism. I appreciate that his current book is working hard not to get drawn into sentimentality about hunter-gatherers, that Diamond believes himself to be steering a middle course between ethnocentric arrogance and romanticism about ‘noble savages’. I appreciate that Diamond thinks The World Before Yesterday is deeply appreciative of “traditional societies” and so is baffled to be accused of hating on them.

I also appreciate not just that his audiences are looking for a clear writer who seems knowledgeable about many issues, but for “big theories” of human history and culture that do not require having a Ph.D’s worth of knowledge and training in order to understand or articulate.

The problem is that there are a lot of problems with Diamond’s work in both his command over the literatures he’s synthesizing, the selectivity of his synthesis, and the uncharitable and at times incomprehensible framing he makes of any potential objections (when he can be bothered to acknowledge that such a thing could exist). Scholars who try to point out these things politely get ignored or acknowledged in passing, as in Razib Khan’s update to his post at Gene Expression. I’ve been in a number of discussions over the years with people who like Diamond’s books who then say, “But yeah, he gets a lot of things wrong” or “yeah, his theory is really overexaggerated and simplistic” as if that’s not even worth talking about and as if you’re a hater for even wanting to talk about it. Small wonder that some scholars, particularly anthropologists, lose their shit when there’s a new Diamond book out there. Sometimes you lose your shit when people insist that they don’t really want to talk about all the people (including you) who are not losing their shit. Why doesn’t Khan want to talk about Alex Golub’s careful, detailed response to Diamond’s book? Why isn’t Golub the “typical anthropologist” for Khan but some folks working for an NGO are? Probably because that would take a longer, smarter entry.

I agree with Khan that sometimes the shit-losing leads people to say things that are just as problematic–to sneer at Diamond’s readers, to condemn anybody who tries to have a “big theory” about human history and culture, or to go too big in characterizing what’s wrong with his work. But have some sympathy here, because Diamond and a few others in his intellectual neck of the woods like Stephen Pinker, specialize in cherrypicking big fields of scholarly work for a few friendly citations and then acting as if what they’ve found is the entirety of those fields. Diamond and Pinker also seem unable to resist setting up straw man versions of legitimate criticisms (and then a few of their critics can’t seem to resist falling into that characterization).

In an earlier comment, I mentioned at least a few areas where there seems to me to be a genuine debate with a range of legitimate positions that require respect, if not agreement, in terms of Diamond’s latest (as well as Pinker’s latest book, which has some overlap):

1. Maybe New Guinea isn’t representative of all modern “traditional societies”, let alone hunter-gatherers in all of human history. Maybe there is considerably more variety in terms of violence and many other attributes than Diamond lets on. Maybe he’s not even paying attention to the full range of anthropological or historical writing about New Guinea. Maybe Diamond isn’t even living up to his own stated interest in the variations between such societies.

2. Maybe modern hunter-gathering societies are not actually pristine, unchanging survivals of an earlier era of human history, but instead the dynamic consequence of large and small-scale migrations of agriculturalists and even more recently, industrial workers. At least in some cases, that might be why hunter-gatherers inhabit remote or marginal environments, not because of preference, but as a response to the sometimes-violent movement of other human societies into territories that they used to inhabit. Meaning taking whatever it is that they have been doing in the 20th Century (violence or otherwise) as evidence of what they’ve always done is a mistake.

3. Maybe defining violence or war in a rigorous, consistent, measurable and fully comparative way is much harder than Diamond or Pinker think it is.

4. Maybe between what Diamond calls a “traditional society” and modern “WEIRD” societies (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) there are lots of other models. Maybe “between” is the wrong term altogether since it implies that there’s a straight developmental line between “traditional society” and modernity, an old teleological chestnut that most anthropologists and historians would desperately like to get away from. I haven’t read very far yet into the book, but Diamond doesn’t seem to have any idea, for example, that there have been numerous societies in human history where there have been many connected communities sharing culture and language at high levels of population density and complexity of economic structure that have nevertheless not had a “state” in the usual sense. What are those? Also: maybe Diamond frequently confuses “traditional” and “premodern”. Much of the time when he says, “Well, we modern WEIRD people do X, ‘traditional societies’ do Y”, the “Y” in question would apply equally to large premodern states and empires.

Or to summarize: maybe Diamond is pushing way, way too hard for a clean distinction between two broadly drawn “types”: “traditional society” and “modern society”, and is distorting, misquoting, truncating or overlooking much of what he read (hard to tell what he read, since there’s no footnotes) to make the distinction come out right.

This is not nit-picking, this is not complaining about a spelling error or some mildly errant footnote on p. 79. This is not pedantry. This is important. The more airtight you want to make your universalisms, the more that you tend to spring leaks–and the more leaks you spring, the faster your boat sinks. A “big theory” that’s advanced with generosity and gentleness, which grants its own provisional character, is a sturdier way to inspire discussion and create understanding. As Golub points out, that is not what Diamond is doing, so much so that his description of other ways of thinking is very nearly incoherent.

Good, simple, accessible synthesis does not require a lack of generosity towards the scholarship that makes it possible. And a good synthesis should always be as much a guide to the possibilities of interpretation around a complex subject as it is a defense of a singular interpretation.

Syllabus maintenance and construction is one of the quintessentially invisible parts of a professor’s job. I’m still stunned from time to time that many people outside of academia or education think that a professor or teacher just walks into a classroom and recites knowledge at students. I read a large range of books and essays that never make it into the syllabus as I’m thinking about lectures or discussions I’d like to convene. I look back over evaluations and consider how past assignments have worked or not and what kinds of pedagogical tweaks or experiments I might try in a given course. I’m usually still shifting around a few things here and there a day or two before the semester starts. (Well, and afterwards, but that’s a different kind of project.)

There’s also a lot of annoying logistics to deal with most semesters. Right now I’m shifting some readings onto Moodle from Blackboard, which just takes a bit of adaptive adjustment to Moodle’s interface and design. Courses that make more use of technology or have more ambitious media usage require a bit more logistical foresight.

I spend a certain amount of time during the summer thinking about courses I might teach in the future as well. That’s the best time to read and explore in new areas, not just because my schedule is a bit looser but also because I’ll need to be ready when the deadlines to get new courses on the schedule hit in the middle of a busy semester.

Barring that, the real upshot of this should be than any writer who publishes in the UK should think again. And anyone reviewing or commenting or footnoting or otherwise using writers who publish in the UK should think once more beyond that.

Or perhaps even just ways of lightly taking Europe or the West as a universal subject. A couple of folks in my Twitter feed were pointing out recently how annoying it is when a journalist or travel writer talks about how some non-Western place is “in the 13th Century” or is “unchanged for the last millennium”, because the 13th Century the reporter has in mind is almost certainly a generically European one, not the local past.

What makes this kind of thing aggravating is that it’s unnecessary. If someone wants to make a serious argument that the West really is unique, that post-1450 world history revolves around a “European miracle”, that some kind of universalism is necessary and has to reference the Enlightenment: that’s all perfectly legitimate fuel for an intellectually respectable argument.

If on the other hand someone wants to be a serious, committed racist, that’s not at all legitimate but it’s very likely an intentional practice and whatever they have to say about the barbarism or backwardness of non-Western societies is thus equally deliberate.

Casually Eurocentric terms of phrase, or ways of framing an analysis that take Europe as the universal human subject without really needing or meaning to? I don’t feel inclined to drop a ton of polemical bricks every time I come across this sort of thing, or act as if every instance is one bar on an epistemological cage. Sometimes this kind of construction is just careless, and more importantly, completely unnecessary to the ideas or expression in question.

Case in point, Richard Mabey’s new book Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants. It’s a very interesting, engaging book that intelligently synthesizes a range of different ideas and discussions of weeds, from literary representations to agricultural science. I recommend it without hesitation.

And yet, Mabey has a habit throughout the book of talking about weeds in an implicitly global or universal tone while much of the content of his discussion of weeds comes from British history and culture, or occasionally more broadly European history and culture. He’s quite aware that in some sense, European weeds are global or universal weeds now, even mentioning Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism to drive home this point. It’s not just that plants from Eurasia have disseminated around the world but that the European way of imagining plants as weeds has done so.

Mabey is terrifically interesting in his reflections on the concept of weeds, pointing out how shifting and contingent it really is. But all the more reason that he ought to be at least slightly aware of the possibility that European ideas about weeds as well as the plants themselves were certainly not universal in the past and may not be universal today.

I understand why an author like Mabey reaches out for what’s close at hand: the plants in his garden, the plants in his country, the plants in his native literature. That’s fine. I’m not asking that an author that’s trying to address the overall concept of weeds go off and read 18th Century Chinese-language documents on agriculture and weeds, or do research on African agricultural history, or anything of the sort. I think it’s fine to gesture outward from what you know best and what you can most easily find to bigger and more general stories.

It’s just that it costs very little and potentially gains a great deal to leave room to wonder about bigger questions: is this how all human societies used to see weeds before modern globalization? Did the concept of a weed even exist in some pre-1750 societies? Are there weeds whose histories of travel and dissemination are strikingly different than the weeds which came from Europe (or were the result of European replantings like Japanese knotweed)? Are there places today where agriculturalists see or talk about weeds in a really different way from the U.S. or Europe? All of these kinds of questions are easy extensions of what Mabey is already interested in, but there’s something about the way he assumes universality at certain moments that prevents them from ever rising to the fore. Without any deliberate effort, England and Europe become the world, the normal, the universal referent and there isn’t any particular reason why they have to be. Provincializing Europe is in some ways a small kind of project and one that shouldn’t require a lot of flash and fire.

That view accidentally underscores a big problem, however, that the general concept of fieldwork, the specific methodology of ethnography, and the disciplinary commitments of anthropology often get badly entangled with one another.

Fieldwork is a big tent, or ought to be. In academia alone, fieldwork is not the same thing as ethnography. Linguists who collect language samples are fieldworkers. Social scientists who do survey research are fieldworkers. Development economists or technologists who advise “bottom-up” community development projects have a fieldwork practice. Scientists who work with “vernacular science” have a fieldwork practice. Historians who go into archives, archaeologists who go into dig sites: they all have to go to some “other” place, they all have a sense that “being there” is required for the creation of knowledge.

Some years ago, I got tangled up in a project with a foundation that aimed to convene a discussion about the status and future of fieldwork practices. I had the idea that we ought to bring together academics whose disciplinary practices centered on fieldwork with professionals outside of academia whose work also relies on the idea that you must go somewhere else besides an office, into the field, in order to carry out your work, where the place and people there are what the work is all about. I thought of a number of examples: journalists, travel and fiction writers, landscape artists, police, spies, focus-group market researchers. In some cases, these other professions have methodologies that have strong resemblances to standard scholarly practice in almost every respect. In other cases, the methodology is similar but the ethics governing that methodology are very different: journalists on long assignment and anthropologists can be doing very similar things but with a very different sense of purpose and professional constraint. And in still other cases, such as creative work that depends on having a sense of place, the methodology might be extremely difficult to describe in any straightforward or disciplinary way.

This struck me as an important conversation to have in order to give academics a sense of the potentiality of fieldwork, and in particular, to dislodge anthropology from its sometimes-too-possessive relationship to fieldwork. Even though ethnography is arguably the most dominant mode of fieldwork, it’s important to remember that ethnography and anthropology are not identical. More importantly, it’s important not to view anthropology’s specific traditions of ethical practice as necessary preconditions of fieldwork legitimacy. My desire to be in a “bigger room” for this discussion was partly occasioned by a previous experience in judging a grant competition in which anthropologists (folks whose work and insights I really appreciated and admired) really casually disparaged or dismissed proposals by humanists who wanted to go into a field setting in order to gain interpretative insight for textual criticism or who were seeking inspiration for creative work, largely on the grounds that these proposals had lazy or insufficient fieldwork. The same judgments were sometimes in evidence about survey research or other forms of non-ethnographic fieldwork in the social sciences.

Return to the view I cited above: that fieldworkers should never be a “fly on the wall”. As a dictate about fieldwork as a whole, that shows a characteristic conflation of fieldwork with ethnography, and a classic mismapping of anthropology’s specific ethical vision onto the whole of what might constitute “fieldwork”. Ethnography absolutely requires the fieldworker to be present, visible and participating. It produces knowledge through dialogue, through the insertion of the fieldworker into the lived situation of the communities and institutions being studied. But there are things about places and people that a silent, withdrawn, surveilling observer can learn as well. There’s a huge body of compelling fiction and essays by authors who largely watched from afar, looked on in silence, lived at a remove from the subject of their writing. You could recapture that as “participant-observation” if you like, in the sense that even someone sketching and commenting and looking from a window or a cafe table is socially present, but this is still not the active role that standard-issue descriptions of ethnography expect from the researcher. Other practices of surveillance have their own limits: experts in espionage know that there’s only so much you can learn through intercepts of communication, technological and human observation from afar, and so on. Eventually a spy or a cop has to talk to people, engage in dialogue, ask questions. But the point is that the fly on the wall approach does yield meaningful information within its own constraints, just as participant-observation in a context where the researcher is socially invisible early in their work is very different from work where the researcher is visibly a stranger at every single moment of their work.

The big tent conversation I proposed never went anywhere, not so much because the other participants opposed it but because they found it so odd as to not be worth opposing. That said, I think there are some very interesting conversations happening within anthropology and across the disciplines about the status and future of fieldwork at the moment. Luke Eric Lassiter’s Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography is one great example. The concept of a collaboratory in ethnographic or fieldwork research seems so powerful and so natural once you read through Lassiter (and so embedded, in his view, in a particular scholarly tradition) that any opposing practice of the ethnographer as solitary, romantic, original reader and writer of “other cultures” instantly is shoved out into the outer darkness of bad practice. And yet, there’s some unfinished business here even in the terms of the model that Lassiter sets forth, some examples of how anthropology’s obsessive regard for combining ethical purity with scholarly rigor gets in the way of opening up a collaborative vision of fieldwork.

Chapter Seven deals with the question of “accessible writing”, for example, but I found the discussion mostly reduced to standard (if sound) advice about writing clearly. Writing alongside “natives” in a lot of cases should raise questions about whether writing is at all the proper form for the dissemination of ethnographic knowledge. Depending on who is in the field and where the field is, recorded speech, film, web-published archives of material artifacts and ephemera, (maybe in the style of the Prices’ Equatoria, which Lassiter mentions), cheap periodical literature, you name it, are likely to be more appropriately collaborative modes of expression than the scholarly monograph. And writing well in a clear, crisp, direct Orwellian style might not serve many discursive communities well at all, might not be at all what they expect or prize in written communication. Lassiter points out that scholars want to sound like intellectuals should and that consultants (as he refers to the folks usually called informants) expect that they also should sound intelligent. And yet when we read literature or essays which are meant to convey a sense of place, we often demand versilimitude, that the dialog “sound” as it ought.

As Lassiter points out, first-person writing is often more accessible and more persuasive when it is about experience and place. Maybe that’s an opportunity to circle around again and ask whether there is still a role for sharply written non-collaborative ethnography, for work where an observer underscores their distance from or even antagonism towards a community that they’re investigating. I’ve always seen Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights as a fundamentally ethnographic work. As I read it, Bissinger sees his first obligation as the delivery of the unsparing truth about the community he’s observing. The collaboration came later, when Bissinger goes on to talk with the people of Odessa about their unhappiness and discomfort with the picture he drew of them.

James Faubion and George Marcus’ edited collection Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition is also really useful think-piece on these issues (though the title is a minor example of the confusion between fieldwork, ethnography and anthropology that I’ve been discussing). In many ways, I think Faubion and Marcus’ contributors in their projects and modes of expression are more clearly grappling with the problem of how to deliver or disseminate fieldwork research and to re-situate our sense of what constitutes a field than Lassiter is. I don’t suppose readers of this blog or of my published scholarship will be at all surprised that the George Marcus & Michael Fischer approach to fieldwork and ethnography is appealing to me.

More importantly, they go right to the heart of my concerns as expressed here. Fischer introduces the volume precisely by making the same argument: that fieldwork has to be decoupled from anthropology, and that the meaning of fieldwork has to be dramatically expanded. Fischer, Faubion and other contributors are all too aware of the concrete perils that poses for anthropology as a discipline. Widen, decouple, diffuse, and at the end, what do you have left that is distinctively yours, that anthropology does better than anyone else? But if that’s the only reason not to rethink fieldwork or ethnography (e.g., to secure a permanent claim on institutional resources), then that barrenly instrumental logic sits pretty ill with the other kinds of ethical and intellectual commitments that the discipline often proclaims to be important. The smarter answer might be that as disciplines widen and complicate their methodological paradigms, they should seek new institutional structures that include more disciplines in more recombinant forms under a single roof and that create bordering and connecting programs and projects. (Fischer again argues exactly this, for example, in seeking collaboration between anthropology and science-technology studies [STS]). I think the decomposition of disciplinarity specificity that I’m arguing for here isn’t just something that should be visited upon anthropology as one discipline, but upon many, including my own. (Hence “A Generalist’s Work”.)

What’s left for anthropology very powerfully in the Faubion and Marcus collection is the notion that particular, anecdotal, experiential, observational information counts for something, indeed, that it often explains or at least understands far better what’s happening in the world than one exabyte of well-compiled quantitative data that conforms to the discursive requirements of states, banks and organizations. But if we nestle certain kinds of formal ethnographic study inside a far larger and looser collection of practices that are “fieldwork”, then what I think emerges is that “being there” is another kind of discovery practice, a habit of mind, a commitment to allow the unexpected, unanticipated or unwelcome to enter into the production of knowledge, the crafting of interpretation. This commitment to discovery more than anything accounts for the unwillingness of many anthropologists, historians and humanists to narrate in advance what they expect the product of their work to be, or to countenance the formation of hypotheses or the anticipated contributions to generalization (a very different animal than generalism) might be.

I think that’s also something that characterizes the very best fieldworkers in non-academic traditions: the cop who investigates the crime through and within a community, the spy who really grasps the secret flows of power in a particular place and time, the journalist who is willing to go deep and risk getting lost in events. This perhaps brings back again the proposition that what makes for remarkable or exemplary practice (anthropological or otherwise) is not a standardized method, but the craft and invention of individuals. You can teach some techniques to a fieldworker just as you can teach color theory to a painter or simile to a writer, but what happens then should go far beyond where it started, and be governed far less by any attempt to bring it all back down to some norm or expectation.

I’ve decided to add a category to my blog in which I document the work of reading, study and writing that informs my practice as a generalist and synthesizer. I’m not entirely happy with having to prove that this approach also requires hard work, since I think that concedes more than I’d like to a productivist, bean-counting sensibility. (There’s another attitude that I find perverse: scholars on the left who could otherwise rattle off chapter and verse dismissals of how the logic of capital perverts and twists our human possibilities are sometimes remarkably quick to crack the whip on their colleagues in order to enhance their own authority.) But ok, the point is partly to demonstrate that generalism doesn’t just arise spontaneously from personal intuition, that it is a practice of investigation and inquiry. My generalism is very much mine, much as two specialists in a relatively narrow field of study can nevertheless be extremely different in their understanding of the field. I’m sure over the course of a year of documenting my readings and work, the pattern of my interests will become fairly clear.

I’m going to do this mostly as short book notes or commentary, which is a category of writing on this blog that I enjoy doing anyway and haven’t done enough of over the past year.

So let’s start inside my own “discipline of record” with the 2009 Bancroft Prize-winning book The Comanche Empire, by Pekka Hämäläinen.

Why have I been reading this book, other than it is a terrific work of historical research and analysis? Partly because I think it offers a comprehensively new framework for thinking about the relationship between non-Western and Western empires in the 19th and early 20th Century that goes well beyond the case study in its implications. Much like Richard White’s The Middle Ground and Mechal Sobel’s The World They Made Together, Hämäläinen’s study is a careful questioning of some prevalent understandings of imperial and racial domination and of the nature of imperial frontiers.

The book argues that the newly formed Comanche empire of the late 18th-early 19th Century in south-central and southwest North America did not just happen to coalesce as the early United States pushed westward and the movement towards Mexican independence began, that these were connected events which were in turn part of changes in larger patterns of global trade and political formation. Rather than insisting that Comanche imperialism was somehow dependent upon or caused by the intrusion of the West, Hämäläinen argues that it was both profoundly related to but not a consequence of Spanish, U.S. and Mexican territorial and cultural power. His account refuses to interpret “Indian dispossession back in time to structure the narrative of early America”, insisting instead that the formation of the Comancheria has to be understood on its own terms, not as a prelude to some inevitable later imperialism.

Most immediately, the book inspires me to think differently about African polities between 1780 and 1880. Hämäläinen’s analysis underscores for me the extent to which much of the political history of African societies in this period has been either similarly subjugated to a backshadowed sense of some later inevitable imperialism or is frankly shoved aside for the ways in which it complicates post=1960 nation-making projects. The history of the Ndebele polity in what is now southern Zimbabwe (and other mfecane-linked episodes of state formation) is very much an “African imperialism” with some resemblances to the Comancheria as Hamalainen describes it. It’s inconvenient to dwell on it as such as this destabilizes both the production of southern African indigeneity and the assumption of the unique moral infamy of late 19th Century white imperialism.

In a larger sense, this kind of analysis also points the way out of some of the stalls and cul-de-sacs of postcolonial theory towards the work that Anthony Appiah has been pursuing in Cosmopolitanism and The Ethics of Identity, the critique of statism that James Scott has been refining in his last few books, or the wide-frame reconceptualizing of what we mean by “empire” that Frederick Cooper and Jane Burbank have initiated recently. Hämäläinen’s book is the kind of really focused, detailed reconsideration that moves conceptual and intellectual debates ahead where more abstract or theoretical interventions (such as Nicolas Thomas’ Colonialism’s Culture or David Scott’s work) might not. For exactly that reason, it’s the kind of book that should quickly leapfrog out of the specialized historiography to which it most immediately belongs and be read widely, and not just by other historians or specialists with an interest in Native American or Western culture.

Rather than a dreary point-by-point response to everything objectionable in the essay, I want to focus on one issue in it that Alan Jacobs and I were discussing earlier on Twitter, because it’s a problem that crops up in similar jeremiads against the culture of the present.

Edmundson complains that literary scholars stopped making judgments about the relative quality of literary and cultural work in the course of the 1960s, thereby instantaneously flushing the entirety of the Western tradition down the toilet in a matter of a decade or so. Why didn’t the public at large just keep at the discernment of quality thing? Because ultimately Edmundson, similar to some conservative or traditionalist humanists, believes in a command model. The public only valued literature because the critics told them to. The public only understood literature because the critics told them what it meant. The public only read literature because the critics lead them through the reading of it. Once the commandment vanished, so did the Western tradition itself, and with extraordinary rapidity.

For one, this doesn’t exactly square with claims about the immortal greatness of Shakespeare, Milton, Melville, etcetera. So self-evidently great, so full of incomparable majesty and worth, so important that they get tossed overboard for “Three’s Company” and some nachos the moment a small group of tweed-festooned men stop continuously churning out oracular instructions about how to read and honor the classics? That’s a picture of literary criticism that makes critics sound more like secret police for an authoritarian regime.

Second, of course, most of the canon as it stood in 1950 or so is still being read and valued by critics and general audiences alike. But I’m tired of trying to make that particular point to the “English departments only teach classes about the laundry lists of left-handed lesbian Iniut factory workers” crowd: you can hear a thunderous squoosh of fingers inserted into earwax every time this fact gets in the way.

Third, and most important, Edmundson and a small number of similarly-minded critics prefer to see criticism in terms of a command model, and their critical colleagues as betrayers, because the alternative is to actually make arguments about quality that are persuasive. If there’s anything that’s been forgotten (by Edmundson, apparently) it is that these are the hardest kinds of interpretation, not the easiest, at least if you want to make them as substantive, well-reasoned intellectual claims built on a systematic infrastructure that other critics could add to or disagree with. Arnold’s aphorism about the best that has been said and known stirs many a critical heart, but don’t forget the hard work that follows if you don’t want statements about quality to simply be a tea-sipping genteel version of The Argument Clinic from Monty Python.

When a critic with this complaint against the present moment actually ventures to anoint a literary work as having quality (or as lacking it), their assertion often comes down to one of three things: 1) of course this is great, because it is one of those works that was called great by those great literary critics we used to have; 2) of course this is great because the wrong kind of lesbo-Marxist-postmodernist critics hate it WARGLEBARGLE LOOK OVER THERE IT’S A UFO; 3) of course this is great because it talks about love and sadness and things that are very profound and makes me feel all philosophical and stuff, like when I was a teenager and did I ever tell you about how I felt in high school?

Go ahead, think about it for a minute. Why is one work of literature great and another not so much? For that matter, why is a work of high culture great compared to a work of popular culture? (Or is it?) The answers to those questions are never obvious. If you think you can tell me in a paragraph why Moby Dick is a greater work of literature than Northanger Abbey, I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about, even though I’d completely agree with the sentiment.

There is a reason that critics did stop making “is this great?” the first and last question of literary analysis (Edmundson is not wrong to say that this problem has been sidelined in cultural criticism, and this does indeed raise problems, as the concept of good and bad work is indispensible). The reason is that it’s a really hard philosophical problem that was made to seem easier through slight-of-hand when the answer was conflated with the preferences and tastes of a fairly narrow social class that held itself aloof from a wider public.

It is not a question that can be successfully answered through collecting data or assembling evidence. The history of critical judgment does not provide one with any confidence of steady improvement over time in the sorting of great from not-great, even before the dirty hippies and postmodernists wrecked the whole thing. Many works that traditionalists now commonly celebrate as self-evidently “great”, literature that makes its way into Great Books programs, was not infrequently once regarded by expert judgment as derivative, weak, pointlessly transgressive, vulgar, or lowbrow popularizing. Tell me that Dickens is great, and I’ll remind you that there were once expert critics who saw him otherwise. It works as well the other direction as well: there’s a long list of works once lauded as self-evidently great which even the most florid defender of the traditional canon would likely concede are now best forgotten.

I’d welcome an investigation of what makes some cultural works great and others ordinary or bad that was consciously intended to provide a critical toolkit to other readers and critics. Note that to be useful as an infrastructure for future criticism, such a work couldn’t answer all questions of greatness in advance. Not a canon, but the foundation for making a canon. To be useful, it would have to be applicable to works that its creator had never read or considered, and to stimulate rather than close down debate about works that its creator knows well.

That’s a mighty work I’m imagining. I wouldn’t blame anyone for refusing to tackle it. I would blame those, however, who regard this kind of critical judgment as easy, blame all the rest of the world for failing to undertake it, and yet can’t seem to be bothered to do it themselves beyond a few one-liner declarations about the greatness of favored works.

Novik’s series is focused on the adventures of a British naval captain and his accidentally-acquired dragon, who turns out to be a highly intelligent and strong-willed member of a breed previously found only in China. Over time, Captain William Laurence and the dragon, Temeraire, have grown increasingly estranged from the British military and now from British society as a whole. What originally started as a bit of a mash-up of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels has developed its own distinctive feel.

As I’ve noted previously, Novik’s alternative history has the escalating feel of galloping away from her in a way that I find kind of intriguing if also perilous to the coherence of the series.

The changes that her story has made to world history are now so comprehensive that they’re plainly straining her ability to keep all the balls in the air, which I think is one reason why the newest volume in the series sometimes feels a bit boring and glum, like it is stalling for time. Still, I really enjoy thinking through the cascading sequence of alternate events and conditions that she’s set in motion, like those thought-experiments where legal scholars sit down and try to figure out what laws would govern vampirism or lycanthropy if they were real.

Novik deserves a lot of credit for not just returning the status quo in each book to a kind of Napoleonic-era + dragons baseline. That’s what a lot of her fans seem to want: the comfort of keeping early 19th Century British military officers as British military officers, in a setting where the British Empire is a pleasantly nostalgic backdrop to the action. There are a lot of complaints from readers that the characters are “too modern”, the plot developments too politically correct. I think in many cases, these are readers who don’t really know much about the actual history of the British Empire (and therefore regard it as impossible that there should have been actual British people in 1800 who were anti-imperialist or at least indifferent to imperialism) and are more comfortable with non-Western people in such tales being nothing more than background elements. I agree that Novik is starting to use Temeraire as a kind of ‘modern’ critic of imperialism, but given that the European-trained dragons in some respects function as “anthropologists from Mars” (e.g., they’ve previously not had much exposure to human institutions or knowledge, but Temeraire’s sharp interest in these subjects has changed things), it’s not at all unreasonable that he should ask some basic questions, such as why lodging a claim of territorial sovereignty based on Captain Cook getting off his boat briefly makes any sense whatsoever.

Spoilers ahead for Tongues of Serpents.

Sending Temeraire and Laurence off to Australia is a solid low-key follow-up to the last volume’s major developments: it gets the characters away from the major global events unfolding, and lets Laurence slowly come to the next stage of his development as a character, turning his back on the British Empire for good. Temeraire clearly has already come to the point of regarding imperialism as nonsense, though in a dragonish fashion.

But enough information gets added to the picture of Novik’s alternative world that the next volume honestly should take place in a setting that is thoroughly unlike the early 19th Century in any respect: this is no longer just Napoleonic Europe + dragons. Here’s what I noted:

There are now at least two other major “dragonish” species of creatures in this world, with serious political and military implications. There are sea serpents, some of them trained and under the control of a renascent Chinese empire, and there are bunyips in the Australian outback, which aren’t under human control but are clearly intelligent and hostile to human beings.

In the meantime, an alliance of African kingdoms using weaponized dragons has attacked European ports in the Mediterranean in retaliation for the slave trade and have been given naval transports by Napoleon to Brazil, where they have continued their attacks, now on slave plantations. (I complained earlier about Novik’s idea that “the Tswana”, a single state/people from southern Africa, could have crossed the rest of the continent to North and West Africa as if it were more or less unpeopled and then carried out military operations from there, so I’m taking her continued mentions of “the Tswana” as being an alliance of multiple African states. Because that’s what makes sense to me.)

So let’s sum this up: Britain no longer has effective naval superiority in the eastern Pacific because of Chinese sea serpents, plus China is no longer the enfeebled Qing China of the early 19th Century, but instead under leadership determined to push back on European advances. African states are working in alliance to destroy the slave trade, European states no longer have territorial footholds in West or Southern Africa, and with the aid of Napoleon, Africans have begun an invasion of the New World.

In addition, we hear a bit more about North America in this volume, including the proposition that dragons there are increasingly being used by both European and Native American merchants for air transport of commodities rather than as military assets.

All that adds up to an utterly different, almost alien world, quite aside from there being dragons and such:

*No plantation slavery past 1810 anywhere in the world, assuming that the African alliance doesn’t meet meaningful resistance. Huge implications not just for the New World and Europe, but for Africa.
*Air transport of goods within continental landmasses, so no need for railroads or even canal-building in North America. (This is assuming dragon husbandry can produce sufficient numbers of animals to meet increased demand + sufficient food for the dragons. Industrialization of meat production might come earlier in this world!)
*Societies previously vulnerable to European expansion are strongly defended: it’s hard to see how Europeans would gain imperial hegemony over the Australian outback, China, or Africa.

Now add to this that whether she knows it or not, Novik is laying the groundwork for some kind of dragon liberalism, that Temeraire is more or less heading in the direction of a dragonish verison of the Enlightenment. I’m not sure Novik will want to pull the trigger on this particular mantlepiece gun, but it’s hard to see how she can avoid it. I keep wondering why Temeraire hasn’t read Rousseau, Voltaire, Adam Smith, John Locke, Montesquieu and so on, given his interests. (Maybe he has and I just missed it, but…) Conversely, of course, imagine what Enlightenment thinking would have looked like if there was another unmistakeably sentient species sharing the planet with human beings, and what the intellectual consequences of news about the emancipated status of dragons in Chinese society in particular might have been within European society. Dragon Chartism can’t be far off. Though Novik has also done more and more in each volume to establish what the dragonish version of “reason” looks like, and it’s not entirely human. Dragons have a psychologically dependent relationship on the human that they imprint upon at birth, and dragons have an avid near-instinctive interest in loot and riches that has nothing to do with accumulation in the human sense.

Of course, the extent to which Novik is engaged in world-building is also raising a lot of questions not just about future events in her series, but about the implausibility of the past of her world. How exactly did Europeans engage in post-1492 expansion in the New World if the Incas and other Native American states had dragons? (We know that the Inca and Aztec Empires resisted Iberians successfully, but on the other hand, we now know also that Portugal has extensive holdings in Brazil. These are hard to reconcile.) What exactly do the Americas look like, anyway, and where on earth were all those African slaves going to? (Something I wondered about the last time I posted on the series.)

Why did West African states tolerate the slave trade in the first place? Did the Mongols use dragons, and wouldn’t that have made a difference in their conquests whether they did or not? More importantly, why have intelligent dragons ever tolerated subservience to humans? How could dragons make any ecological sense whatsoever given their need for huge amounts of meat? Some dragon breeds in the books are able to eat two or three large mammals per day. (Not to mention economic sense: even a small dragon force would have put a huge burden on most preindustrial societies.) I’m hard pressed to understand dragon evolution in any respect, even given centuries of artificial selection.

Etcetera. But like I said, I enjoy the extent to which Novik is at least allowing these kinds of questions to slowly rise to the surface in the series. I really do think it’s time for her to move into a completely new narrative line and start putting the dragons into the politics of the European Enlightenment: a dragon-rights campaign would make perfect sense, given the direction of the series so far.

I kept meaning to put my list of the six best fantasy novels into the comments thread at Crooked Timber but time got the better of me and before I knew it what was up at CT instead was a bizarrely contentious comments thread on Scott McLemee’s totally legitimate critique of Cornel West’s latest book.

So much later, here’s my list of the best six TEN fantasy novels it is!

But first a word on this sort of exercise as well. Some might poo-poo the idea of such a list as always hobbled by the mixing of apples and oranges, or by the impossibility of clearly defining the field from which a list is selected. The thread at Crooked Timber had a lot of that kind of discussion. But it also showed why the exercise is a good one, partly because it brings out into the open the range of assumptions that audiences make about a particular kind of culture. It’s also interesting to see how passionately felt these kinds of judgments can be, both about individual works that one puts (or does not put) on a list, and about what the principles of constructing such a list ought to be. For myself, when I make a list like this, I try to balance representing the diversity of a field with a nod to canonical works which I agree have great historical importance in shaping that field. Plus I like to throw in a few idiosyncratic judgments about work that I think is underrepresented or overlooked.

So here’s my list:

John Crowley, Little, Big. In the CT thread, there was a pretty sharp split between people that simply don’t like this book and those that love it. I can actually see both sides. It’s a very atmospheric work: you’re either drawn into the mood it creates or you’re not.

Barry Hughart, Bridge of Birds. There isn’t a lot of fantasy out there that works with non-Western themes, stock narratives, and so on. Some of the few books that try to do so come off pretty badly because they’re built on a crudely Western perspective on non-Western folk cultures or mythologies. But I really like Hughart’s work with a fantasy China in his hard-to-find series.

Ursula Le Guin, The Farthest Shore. Earthsea seems another series that divides a lot of genre readers. For me, it was an important counterpoint to Tolkien when I first discovered it: quieter, more contemplative, intelligent in its thinking about magic. It’s such a commonplace in fantasy works that magic has a price or a cost, but rarely is that worked out as more than a slogan, given that readers are almost always meant to covet magic and identify with sensitive wielders of its power within a given setting.

Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan. Another book to savor for mood rather than plot, but I think that’s often what defines fantasy best, as a setting and feeling. Plot-driven fantasy frequently struggles to be anything besides “innocent farm boy discovers he is secretly a prince, gets a magic sword and a wise mentor, meets girl, loses girl, defeats enemy, wins kingdom, gets girl.” I first read Titus Groan while living in a homely but pleasant bedsit in London while doing my dissertation research: it pretty much defined for me that sense of a fantasy work that generated a sense of being adrift in a world whose everyday rules and sensations were different from my own.

K.J. Bishop, The Etched City. Yet another book that’s about mood rather than story. (In fact, the plot misses a lot of opportunities for smart closure and clever connections.) I regard this book as my favorite example of the kind of fantasy that Mieville, Vandermeer, or Alan Campbell have written, of grim quasi-Victorian imaginary cities full of dark satanic mills of one sort or another.

Lloyd Alexander, The High King. Despite my slang above on the boy-becomes-king narrative, this is a really terrific example of that baseline story. What makes it work so well even now is partly the persuasive underlying morality of the story, that its protagonist is faced with such difficult choices and genuinely earns his kingship rather than by some innate nobility.

Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light. Right, I know, it’s also “science fiction”. A good book for pushing genre definitions in that respect, but it’s also just a great book, period. When I first read it as a teenager, I do remember getting a bit tripped up on the temporal framing of the story until I’d read it through twice, and even now that seems a bit rough to me. It has some of Zelazny’s typical schtick, but it’s in its most appealing and interesting form here.

T.H. White, The Once and Future King. Long a favorite, but I do sometimes wonder why when I re-read it. It has long stretches that are emotionally distant. The Lancelot-Guinevere material suffers some from White’s own remote and austerely tormented masculinity, his inability to really imagine Guinevere (or any other woman) in an even vaguely sympathetic way. When I was young, the material after Arthur’s childhood didn’t always work for me. But now at least some of it does: the regrets, the inability to break habits, the confinement of commitments made and codes adopted. The moral force of the first book is also still so very powerful, and the little asides about medieval life are also a kind of ground-floor realism about that backdrop that the routine sword-and-sorcery works in the genre still decline to take up.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon. Best read alongside White, but it’s also a smart critique of the entire genre, and opened the way for a lot of other inversions and deconstructions.

JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. Gotta have it, even if its many imitations are an affliction on fantasy as a whole.
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What’s not on my top ten, and why.

George R.R. Martin. Partly because the series is unfinished (I suspect it will remain so) and partly because I think the pleasures of A Song of Fire and Ice are partly a matter of counterprogramming against a wretched brood of tolkienish imitators.

John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost. A bit too slight to make the top ten, but I do love this book.

Phillip Pullman, His Dark Materials. I like The Amber Spyglass better than most people do, but I’d agree the series falls down a bit in a number of ways in the third volume.

Samuel Delany, Neveryon. I tried to teach this book once in a course on historical memory. Unfortunately takes about 600 pages (and two books in the series) for the point to sink home, so it didn’t work very well. I think I’d include it as part of any master course in fantasy–it’s a great work of literary criticism disguised as a work of literature, really.

J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter. I really do like these books as a whole, but I don’t think of them as top ten material.

Guy Gavriel Kay. Again, almost. I just don’t think anything Kay has written quite cracks this list–yet. But I feel as if some future work might. Kay raises the same question for me that Susanna Clark (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell) does: namely, what does making a work of fiction into a work of fantasy permit that writing a historical novel does not? I’m not always clear with Kay or Clark what writing in a speculative mode accomplishes.

Clive Barker, Imajica. The CT thread brought this up, and I was almost tempted to include it, as I remember it making a big impression on me when I read it. But there’s something about the book that doesn’t quite cross the threshold, though I’m hard-pressed to say why.

Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood. Too diagrammatic, which is sort of the point of the book, I know. Again, I’d include it in any master-class on fantasy, for sure.

Neil Gaiman. You may commence throwing things at me, but I think he’s a pleasant but unextraordinary fantasy writer who is also the writer of a very good comic-book series. None of his fantasy novels have wowed me, though none of them have bugged or annoyed me, either.

Madeline L’Engle, Wrinkle in Time and Wind in the Door. Still very good books, but re-reading them, I found them a bit preachy and very prone to declare rather than show when it comes to declaring things beautiful and wonderful and horrible.

Jorge Luis Borges. If I were to classify him as fantasy? Oh yes, we have a winner. I guess when all is said and done, I still think of fantasy as genre, which is not the same as fiction with elements of the fantastic. That list is a different list populated with Swift, Shelley, Borges and others. But I know full well that this is also a bad view in many respects, using genre as confinement, as a kind of fannish self-hatred, and so on. It sets up a wretched situation where the fan has to argue that their favorite works are “really” literature, or deserve favorable comparison with “mainstream” work. But genre is real, or at least the real product of histories of readership and circulation, and can’t just be abolished like that. I do think it would be profitable to ask which of the ten above I’d put into the same weight class as Swift or Borges and think they’d emerge creditably. On the flip side, ask me when the last time I read Swift for pleasure, and he might not come out so well. (Borges does pretty well in either context, on the other hand.)