My Latest Publishing Success!
Center for Peripheral Studies
Lee Drummond, director
www.peripheralstudies.org
leedrummond@msn.com
My Latest Publishing Success!
(Well, okay, Misadventure. But, hey, I did play the SIT-PIG – as in Submit It To
Publish It Game – with the esteemed Center for a Public Anthropology (which fosters
accountability) and the University of California Press. My essays on 9/11, Jonestown,
and the abortion issue just weren’t accountable enough or, perhaps, public enough.
So, back to electronic dust. Here’s how it went down, down, down.
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New Deadline for UC BOOK COMPETITION
The California Series in Public Anthropology
encourages professional scholars from a wide
range of professions and fields to address
important public issues in publicly meaningful
ways. To reinforce this effort, the University of
California Press in association with the Center for a
Public Anthropology is sponsoring an international
competition that awards a formal, publishing
contract for the best book proposal submitted -independent of whether the author has completed (or
even started) the proposed manuscript. The Series is
open to working with authors as they wind their way
toward completion. The winner will receive, in
addition to a formal book contract from the
University of California Press, a five thousand
dollar advance.
If you are interested in learning more about the
University of California Press/Public Anthropology
Competition, the book contract, the five thousand
dollar advance and the new deadline, please visit this
link.
May we ask you to forward this email on to others you
think might be interested? In the past, we have had a
number of exciting proposals from people who learned
about the Competition in this way. Thank you.
Dr. Rob Borofsky
Director, Center for a Public Anthropology
Co-Editor, California Series in Public Anthropology
The Center for a Public
Anthropology is a non-profit
that encourages scholars and
their students to address public
problems in public ways.
707 Kaha Street
Kailua, HI 96734-2093
webmaster@publicanthropology.org
http://www.publicanthropology.org
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Dear Dr. Borofsky,
Attached please find my proposal for a book, to be considered in your University of
California Press / Center for a Public Anthropology book competition.
Thank you for considering my proposal.
Lee Drummond
February 19, 2011
To: Dr. Rob Borofsky, Co-Editor, California Series in Public Anthropology
( bookseries@publicanthropology.org )
From: Lee Drummond, Center for Peripheral Studies, Palm Springs CA
( leedrummond@msn.com )
Re: Proposal for University of California Book Competition
Dear Dr. Borofsky,
I am writing to ask you to consider a book proposal from me.
The proposed work brings together threads of thinking and writing I have done at
the Center over the past several years. Perhaps the best and most concise introduction to
that work is to excerpt from the Center’s statement of goals on its Home Page (from
www.peripheralstudies.org ):
_________________________________________
The Center exists to explore boundaries and their interconnective or intersystemic
properties: boundaries between individuals, between human groups, between humans and
animal species, between human and extraterrestrial species, and, ultimately, between
human thought and physical reality. The perspective or bias that inspires these
explorations is that the essence of a person, group, species, idea, or object is its edges: the
interactions or intersystems it sets in motion in the process of being.
Cultural Anthropology: Theory and Practice. The work of the Center proceeds
along two broad but closely related fronts: a general inquiry into the nature of culture or
semiosis/symbolization; and an application of cultural analysis or anthropological
semiotics to institutions and crises of modern life, including the ecology movement,
popular culture (movies, TV, sports, music), the abortion issue, and terrorism. In both
instances, cultural anthropology appears to have gone seriously astray, abandoning its
earlier efforts to construct a theory of culture while abdicating its responsibility to engage
the social issues that animate contemporary life.
Applying cultural anthropology or cultural analysis to these theoretical and topical
problems thus involves an interrogation of the field of cultural anthropology itself. This
is all to the good, since the current somnambulistic malaise of the discipline warrants
action -- lets wake up!
The Center's website is a collection of documents (some published, some unpublished,
some doubtlessly unpublishable), of manuscripts in progress, and of journal-type entries
that are mostly commentaries by Center thinkers on recent events and social/cultural
trends. Whatever their literary and conceptual merits, which may indeed be slight, these
pieces are truly peripheral: they deviate from canons of anthropological writing just as
they do from those of mainstream "intellectual" journals. Neither fish nor fowl, but
smelling of both, these works represent the best sustained thought we've been able to
achieve and are herewith consigned to the denizens of the World Wide Web. May you
have fun with them. Or, as your waiter says, often in a disconcertingly imperative tone:
"Enjoy!".
_______________________________________
I think the theoretical and applied cultural analyses described above fit together
quite well in a comprehensive inquiry into the nature of culture and its particular
manifestations in American society. As I understand it, though, it is the topical analysis
of contemporary life which your Series aims to encourage, and I applaud you and the
University of California Press for that endeavor. As I have noted in a couple of brief
essays in the Anthropology News and as I expound on in the longer essays presented
below, I think it is a crying shame, really nothing short of an intellectual scandal, that
cultural anthropology, which should be supremely well-suited to provide a focused,
deeply reasoned critique of contemporary American society has fallen so far short of its
potential.
My theorizing, which your Series understandably would find mostly beside the
point, is to be found in Chapter 3 of American Dreamtime, “A Theory of Culture as
Semiospace,” and in the rather long essay, “Culture, Mind, and Physical Reality: An
Anthropological Essay.” I do want to note, however, that aspects of this theorizing lead
directly into my call for the development of a Nietzschean anthropology – and that is
immediately relevant to the task of a critique of modern society.
The actual book proposal I would like to make is that three or, possibly, four
essays on the Center web site be incorporated in a volume which applies a nascent
Nietzschean anthropology to specific topics of great recent and/or ongoing concern to
most Americans: the abortion issue; the 9/11 terrorist attack; and the Jonestown
massacre. The possible fourth essay, “The Vanishing White Man: History and Myth in
Guyanese Culture,” while mostly about Guyana, does engage in a topical and substantive
manner with an issue at the writhing heart of American culture: race.
The three essays, given here in their uploadable form from the Center web site
are:
Jonestown: An Ethnographic Essay.
Shit Happens: An Immoralist's Take on 9/11 in Terms of Self-Organized Criticality.
News Flash! Cultural Anthropology Solves Abortion Issue!
(Being a Cultural Analysis of Sigourney Weaver's Aliens Quartet)
Story at Eleven!
The third essay, “News Flash! . . .” is a continuation and, hopefully, refinement of
ideas presented in my American Dreamtime: A Cultural Analysis of Popular Movies, and
Their Implications for a Science of Humanity. That work proposes that a close, cultural
anthropological examination of popular movies offers insights into the nature of
American society/culture and, by extension, into the very nature of culture itself. James
Bond movies, Star Wars, Jaws, and E. T. yield, to the dedicated analyst, important
messages about our rapidly evolving relations with machines, with animals, with our
notions of the supernatural, and with our own and other groups. The “News Flash!. . .”
essay proceeds with this line of analysis, here applying it to the four Alien movies
featuring Sigourney Weaver. The analysis ties images and plots in the four movies to the
abortion issue, and offers what I’m sure most people would find a novel, if unpalatable
solution. But. . . story at eleven! What I’d like to emphasize here, perhaps in keeping
with the goals of your Series, is that a deep, analytical engagement with everyday (some
would say frivolous) aspects of American society may lead to a correspondingly deep
understanding of that society and its people. (I sketched out the same argument in my
little essay on the movie, Krippendorf’s Tribe, in Anthropology News. Here is the
Abstract of the essay:
________________________________
ABSTRACT
Abortion is perhaps the most divisive conflict within contemporary American society,
with all indications being that both its rhetoric and violence will intensify over the
coming years. This essay proposes that the conflict is not amenable to any conventional
solution: the forces of light or darkness will neither triumph nor agree to compromise.
Rather than American society figuring out what to do about the abortion issue, in all
likelihood the intractable nature of the problem will prove a key element in transforming
fundamental cultural values and ideas concerning human reproduction, medical science,
and the emerging phenomenon of biotechnology. Given the critical nature of the
problem, it is disappointing that social commentators have done little more than bundle
up the platitudes of “freedom to choose” and “right to life” in more or less strident
rhetoric. The most radical and far-reaching treatment of human reproduction in a future
world of biotechnology has come from a perhaps unexpected source: Sigourney
Weaver’s Aliens quartet. The essay conducts a cultural analysis of those movies, and in
the process identifies a solution to the abortion issue. Story at eleven!
_____________________________
I think the “Jonestown” essay might fit well with your Series for two reasons.
First, it is a detailed and intellectually honest anthropological study of an event which
gripped, and deeply troubled, American society for several weeks. Apart from my essay,
I know of only one other cultural anthropological treatment of Jonestown, and that was
by Marvin Harris writing in the New York Times days after the event. As I discuss in the
body of the essay, I regard Harris’s piece as a travesty, an example of an intellectually
dishonest approach which only cripples genuine anthropological thought. I would hope
my essay might heal some of the damage done to those who read Harris’s piece and took
it as “what anthropologists have to say” about the massacre. I would also like to think
that the essay represents what may be done in the area of “public anthropology.” Second,
I note that the Series asks for works that “tell a story,” that are not just abstract, academic
ruminations on some dry-as-dust topic. I entitle my piece on Jonestown “An
Ethnographic Essay,” because it seeks to demonstrate, in the midst of analyzing the
event, what is involved in doing, genuinely and honestly doing ethnography. The essay
unfolds in the context of my long and ever-changing relationship with a Guyanese friend,
and develops an analysis of our relationship to get at both the nature of ethnography and
that of Guyanese culture. There is a small library on Jonestown; I’d like to see a
worthwhile anthropological contribution on the shelf.
My third essay, on the 9/11 terrorist attack, is perhaps the most theoretically and
methodologically ambitious of the three; it is certainly the most audacious. It is written
from the perspective of the immoralist, as Nietzsche has defined that personage in
Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, and other works. As such, the immoralist
refuses to adopt the host of knee-jerk platitudes and the self-righteous pity which
immediately smothered the event of 9/11. Instead, he adopts the self-described role of a
pathologist of American society/culture, picking through the carnage of the ruins for
insights into the true nature of the event. While I could never approach Nietzsche’s level
of profundity or his incomparable style, the essay seeks, in its limited way, to perform the
sort of revaluation of values he called for throughout his works: to paraphrase him, to
look deeply into the abyss of 9/11 in hopes of distinguishing true from false values. Be
advised: the essay is not warm and fuzzy; anthropologists (rarely) call for “cultural
anthropology as cultural criticism”: well, here is the criticism, no-holds-barred.
A novel aspect of the essay, which Nietzsche quite likely would have found
unacceptable, is that it marries his searching analysis of morality, of what lies beyond
good and evil, with – of all things – developments in complexity theory. Hence the
reference in the title to a core notion of that field: self-organized criticality. With armies
of commentators producing mountains of print and video on the true meaning and
significance of 9/11, my essay suggests that their efforts may be completely wrongheaded. Complex systems often reach a point where some cataclysmic event strikes
without warning and, really, without any readily discernible Cause. I suggest that 9/11
was such an occurrence. Sometimes, things just happen. Sometimes, shit happens.
The possible fourth essay you might consider, “The Vanishing White Man . . .”
takes up the vitally important concept of race, but mostly in the context of Guyanese
culture. It does contain a rather pointed discussion of how the discipline of anthropology
has dealt (or refused to deal) with the concept in the context of American race relations,
which readers of the Series might find interesting. Also, as with the Jonestown essay, it
couches the discussion in terms of my own personal involvement with Guyanese society
over a period of years. At any rate, just thought I’d suggest it.
I think the three essays taken together are substantive enough for a book; and
although they are separate works are closely related in thematic and stylistic
development. Because I have long since taken to heart Nietzsche’s maxim always to
combine the serious and the humorous, I’d like to suggest a book title for the essay
collection: Heading for the Scene of the Crash: Essays in the Cultural Analysis of
American Life. I’m sure most anthropologists will recognize the title’s literary allusion:
it’s from a stand-up routine by Ron White (of Blue Collar Comedy fame). Since we are
now a Web-based civilization, perhaps the Series editors might consider including on the
title page a You-Tube link to Professor White’s lecture. (By the way, the title is anything
but frivolous: the Crash it alludes to is the fundamental transformation, not only of our
parochial little American society, but of humanity itself. Sapient squid, anyone?)
That’s about it. As Larry says, I’ve tried to get ’er done. I thank you and your
colleagues for considering my proposal.
Lee Drummond
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aloha Lee,
Thank you for your submission. I opened it fine and it looks quite interesting. I look
forward to reading it after the March 1 deadline. (It makes sense to read all of the
submissions together than piecemeal.)
We will be announce the results of the competition before of by June 1.
Again, thank you for your submission.
Regards,
Rob Borofsky
-Dr. Rob Borofsky
Editor, California Series in Public Anthropology
Director, Center for a Public Anthropology
Professor of Anthropology, Hawaii Pacific University
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But, alas:
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Aloha,
It is my pleasure to announce the winners of this year's California Series in Public
Anthropology's International Competition. There were 282 submissions. They
were from every continent (except Antarctica) and a wide range of professions and
disciplines.
Please click on the link below to see the winning submissions.
http://www.publicanthropology.org/books-book-series/california-bookseries/international-competition/.
As noted in earlier emails, the California Series in Public Anthropology draws professional
scholars from a wide range of disciplines to address major public issues. To reinforce
this effort, the University of California Press in association with the Center for a Public
Anthropology sponsors an international competition that awards a prize of $5,000 plus a
formal, publishing contract for the best book proposal submitted.
The deadline for the 2012 competition is March 1, 2012.
Dr. Rob Borofsky
Director, Center for a Public Anthropology
Co-Editor, California Series in Public Anthropology
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C’est dommage.