If we ever get to the point of, say, decupling funding for NEA, NEH, etc., I'd like to see a bunch of grants in this vein. Call it translational work for the humanities/social sciences.
I think I'd enjoy a job where I took impenetrable bullshit and made it readable
This actually is a large part of my job, and it's really not bad. A lot of the time the original authors are decent enough people. Even the anthropologists. But they're not good at making their writing engaging.
It's a large part of my job too. I'm currently working on explicating three separate pieces of highly arcane EU legislation and distilling half a dozen 400+ page prospectuses.
It was basically all of Siri Keeton's job but his working conditions left something to be desired.
I might enjoy that too! But at some point I might find it necessary to rain furious anger on the offenders. Do they let you do that?
"Offender" is a bit harsh; they're generally bright, well-meaning people who really have discovered something interesting (if their work's dull I don't bother with it), but they're just terrible at writing about it in a concise and engaging way.
Two of three authors in the OP are totally offenders.
I mean, if you can arbitrarily ignore people, fine. But if not, fury.
8: ah, yes. In that case, yes, fury is justified. And I think I may be luckier than you in the overall standard of stuff (moderately high) and in particular the level of pretentiousness (low).
To be clear, this is not my actual job. The anthropology was self-inflicted.
Isn't this just "science journalism" or "science writing" as it's sometimes called? What people like Ed Yong, who seems to gather awards like nuts in May, or Carl Zimmer have been doing for a living most of their adult lives. Neither of those two specialises in writing about anthropology, although they go there occasionally, but I'm sure there are people who do- I only cited them because they're famous-ish. The web-mag Sapiens tries to present anthropology for the intelligent non-anthropologist, for example. I read it, but I'm not anthropologically literate enough to know how good a job it's doing. It's certainly readable.
Not really. These books don't just need interpretation for the general reader, they need page one rewrites by different authors with different mindsets.
Rewrites probably extending to additional secondary research, at least.
It's how I think of the science writing I've done, and, yes, it's great fun. At least, it is when the subject itself is interesting and worthwhile.
Who knew academic writing is generally not the best writing from a smooth reading standpoint?
I don't know anything about anthropology, but the troubles with academic writing aren't going to go away. It takes skill and effort to write something well. This is not something anybody funding research will pay for. Or even notice. Also, journals require that to be listed as an author, you need to have contributed to the writing of the text. Which means that the more people it takes to conduct a piece of research, the worse the write-up will be. Six people can't not mangle prose, especially when half of them keep insisting (with good reason) on various bits of extremely precise language. Also, you get bonus points for being cited. Doesn't matter if anybody reads it.
I suspect there are a great many (most?) historians who write poorly. It's just a bigger field so there are more people in it and more lay readers, so there's a reward for writing well in some cases.
It's like I don't think anthropologists taste better than other people the social and behavioral sciences. I think they are eaten more often because they have more contact with lay people interested in eating them.
Moby is as usual right on all points. I didn't know about the writing requirements in 17, which are egregiously stupid; but all the things I'm complaining about have single authors. And I don't think most historians are bad. Most are mediocre, pretty much by definition. Whereas AFAICR every anthropologist I've tried is awful.
If I have to write by myself, I don't suck. I also never finish anything longer than a couple of pages.
I read a ton of anthropology -- at the more theory-wank end of things -- for my doctorate. I found the writing sometimes oppressively opaque. I persevered because I felt often enough that there were interesting ideas there, grounded -- albeit not very concretely, as it was the afore-mentioned theory-wank end of the spectrum -- in empirical research, fieldwork, etc. I think I learned a lot that was useful to me by reading it.
But it was certainly true that the writing felt difficult in a way that, as per the OP, the work of historians often does not.
The only piece of anthropology I can remember is "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." I remember it as pretty interesting, but perhaps it was only "interesting" compared to whatever else I was reading in graduate school.
It made me wonder why we made cock fighting illegal. It sounded like everybody was having fun and people are going to be eating the chicken anyway.
Maybe that piece was famous because it wasn't as poorly written as other pieces in anthropology? Maybe chickens with knives is just inherently riveting?
I have gotten in the habit of reading ethnographaphies where somebody spends thousand of hours observing something then writes a 150-250 page book. They are generally insightful in a way that has made me intolerant of journalistic efforts where they don't put in that kind of time.
This one got me started
https://www.amazon.com/Karaoke-Nights-Ethnographic-Rhapsody-Alternatives/dp/0759100470
I have read other books on karaoke and they all pretty much suck in comparison
I also like the unadorned style these things use. That book "evicted" pasted 100 pages of literary ness to the form and I hated it
They do rely on theory but they explain the theory so it's alll good
I've hardly read any popular anthropology (assuming we're not counting Jared Diamond). The only book I can think of is War Before Civilization, on ajay's recommendation, which was both absolutely fascinating and rather dry. I'm willing to believe Mossy's hypothesis.
I will read the book in 27 if it is written by somebody Balinese.
23, 26: I'm pissed off especially because they do actually have knowledge, but do an almost willfully bad job conveying it. Like Seeing Like a State has a lot of genuine insight, but all of that insight is contained in the introduction. The rest of the book just repeats the same points without building the argument at all, adducing more examples without expanding or analyzing them; The Art of Not Being Governed is the same but worse.
I'm working from a small sample and hesitate to blame this on the discipline, but the impression I get is of a field with very low standards of argument and evidence, which licenses people to waffle aimlessly.
Anthropology:social sciences::The Hobbit movies:movies about killing dragons.
And, to thumbsuck a diagnosis: anthropologists are essentially committed for historical reasons* to denying the possibility of objective knowledge while at the same time pursuing careers in a system dedicated to the production of objective knowledge. They try to square this talking endlessly about their own subjectivity, so maybe 2/3 of the text in any paper presents and interprets evidence, and the remainder is the writers talking about themselves; all of which to my eyes amounts essentially to nothing but the author saying "I'm an anthropologist".
*AIUI quite good reasons.
I majored in cultural anthro and what Mossy Character says was totally my experience too. A professor explained to me that sometime in the 1980s anthro was flooded with people who washed out of literary theory and ruined all the fun for anthropologists.
You don't have to give people degrees just because they show up. Did somebody tell them that?
As a card-carrying anthropologist I feel I have to respond (and delurk!). MC makes some very fair critiques, especially in 32. I've certainly read (or tried to read) more than my fair share of terribly-written anthropology books and articles. I haven't written any--yet!)
But first off, two of the three authors in the original post are not in fact anthropologists. Gabrielle Hecht is a historian of science and technology, trained in an interdisciplinary science and technology studies program at Penn. She's a longtime member of the Stanford or Michigan history departments--although admittedly she does participate in the History and Anthro PhD program there.
James Scott, meanwhile, is a political scientist by training. He's widely read by anthropologists, he engages in some debates from anthropology, and he has a joint appointment in the Yale anthro department, but he's also influential to historians and some political scientists. I'd also defend him as a pretty good writer, even if SLAS is fairly repetitive.
Second, reading academic monographs (in anthropology or any number of other fields) cover to cover is often a fool's game anyways. They're aimed at other specialists or students who have them as required texts, and often deliberately designed to be read strategically or to be parceled out into chapters that are assigned piecemeal in classes. That repetitiveness is sometimes by by design.
I've thought that math would be better off if there were a bunch of people whose job it was to not produce new research but just make more readable the ideas of others. We somehow need to have a lot fewer papers while still having enough credit to go around for people to get tenure and promotions, and turning busy people or bad writers notes into good papers would be a great way to do it.
I was going to say "Who would pay for that?", but then I remember that in math probably nobody is paying for any of it.
Welcome, col_pogo!
I too am sort of a fan of ethnographies but don't generally seek them out. Maybe I should.
36: I've had this thought too, and thought that I would very much enjoy doing it!
35: Hello col_pogo! Thanks for the comments; which show those authors getting worse the closer they are to anthro. Hecht isn't actually bad, just dull (and the book is adapted from her dissertation, so I cut her some slack) so I included her basically to inflate the sample (I'm an aspirant social scientist); Scott is readable but has the flaws already mentioned; Redfield, the card-carrying anthropologist, is garbage. All I got from Redfield, in fact, was a reference to Hecht, which is why I took her to be swimming in the same waters; and I see Redfield has subsequently written for a book she edited.
I get the strategic repetitiveness and am well trained in skimming monographs, but these things were on a different level altogether.
(I'm an aspirant social scientist)
Paging Dr. Heimlich.
41: NMM since the end of last year, you monster!
On topic, maybe?:
Hobby Lobby is spending all the money it saved on birth control to pay the fines for buying smuggled cultural artifacts. There's no guarantee they funneled money to ISIS, but it's likely.
42: Him and Joyce Carol Oates are people I always figured died before I was born. I don't know why.
And Moby goes from sober commentary to sober reporting. The day grows ever darker.
36: Yeah, for me clarity (of thought and of writing) is one of the highest scientific virtues. I wish there was more work on improving the exposition of known facts in my field too. I have a colleague who often makes cryptic statements--a decent fraction of which are wrong--but then if other people write papers clarifying them, complains that it should have been obvious from the outset that that was what they meant. Whereas I think sometimes the paper that explains things clearly is worth more than the one that said it first, especially when it actually isn't clear to anyone else if the person who said it first really understood what they were saying.
I wrote a paper a couple years ago where I took a body of somewhat mysterious-looking results that other people in a small corner of my community had derived in a weird, clunky way and derived it in a simple, straightforward way. I thought that even if no one outside that corner read my paper, at least the people there would see that I had given them a clearer way to communicate with the rest of us. Nope. They mostly said "well, that's nice, now you know what we knew all along" and went right on talking about things in a language no one else can understand. And people outside their little corner ignored my paper because they were already ignoring the people in that corner. Oh well. I guess I learned my lesson. No working to make other people's results accessible, at least until I have a permanent job.
There's probably a pretty small window between "Doesn't understand this well enough to simplify" and "Too enmeshed in the system to notice it needs simplifying."
re: 47
That was something I noticed a fair bit when teaching. That, generally, being able to simplify something sufficiently to get the core of it across to an undergraduate* was usually a pretty good indicator that I understood the thing well. I also noticed, and I think this is part of the problem described in 47, that my own research was the thing I struggled the most to do that with.
Partly because I was profoundly enmeshed in the details, but also because I was continuously aware of all of the places I might be wrong, or the places where I basically thought everybody else was wrong but hadn't come up with a better answer myself.
* especially one not particularly motivated to learn much about that particular topic/person/area.
That, generally, being able to simplify something sufficiently to get the core of it across to an undergraduate* was usually a pretty good indicator that I understood the thing well.
I'm reading Mervyn King's book "The End of Alchemy" and he cites, approvingly, the rule of thumb of a previous JP Morgan CEO that any product too complicated for its designers to explain to the CEO was too complicated for the bank to risk selling.
And Douglas Adams, of all people, had something very similar in Dirk Gently:
"There wasn't really anything this machine [a 1977 computer] could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble," said Richard, "but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil."
Reg looked at him quizzically.
"I had no idea they were meant to be in short supply," he said. "I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting."
"I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"
479 are very true and well put.
Uh, 47-49. Not that I'm prejudiced against 479. I'll judge it on its merits.