Stuck Moving - (Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century) by Peter Benson (Paperback)

About the Book

"AUTHOR'S NOTE: This book is unconventional. A self-conscious experiment in form that draws together two vernaculars: anthropological thought and the pop culture of my youth. It is a fraught exercise. I write as a White guy about angst and alienation in the privileged spaces of anthropology and higher education. I appreciate the irony. I hope nonetheless that my experiences with and critical perspectives on social conventions, the culture of liberalism, and ableism in academia might be useful. I seek to expand possibilities of anthropological representation while challenging epistemological, aesthetic, and professional norms in my discipline. It bothers me that anthropology can be so sanctimonious. I take aim at the ableist conceit that anthropologists are non-characters studying a messy world. Much of my life has been a mess. My work has been undertaken amid struggles with pregnancy loss, bipolar disorder, and drug addiction. I have deep regrets about my participation in an exploitative field. I have deep regrets about many things. I have hurt people and been hurt by people. I hope my stories and reflections add to what others have already written about a more open, honest, and self-deprecating anthropology"--

Book Synopsis

This one-of-a-kind literary and conceptual experiment does anthropology differently--in all the wrong ways. No field trips. No other cultures. This is a personal journey within anthropology itself, and a kind of love story. A critical, candid, hilarious take on the culture of academia and, ultimately, contemporary society.

Stuck Moving follows a professor affected by bipolar disorder, drug addiction, and a stalled career who searches for meaning and purpose within a sanctimonious discipline and a society in shambles. It takes aim at the ableist conceit that anthropologists are outside observers studying a messy world. The lens of analysis is reversed to expose the backstage of academic work and life, and the unbecoming self behind scholarship. Blending cultural studies, psychoanalysis, comedy, screenwriting, music lyrics, and poetry, Stuck Moving abandons anthropology's rigid genre conventions, suffocating solemnity, and enduring colonial model of extractive knowledge production. By satirizing the discipline's function as a culture resource for global health and the neoliberal university, this book unsettles anthropology's hopeful claims about its own role in social change.

From the Back Cover

"This moving, often-hilarious, always-provocative mix of ethnography, memoir, creative writing, and critical cultural studies is a tour de force of intertextual bricolage. The narrator's ambivalent entanglement with liberal-academic bourgeois cultural capital saturates his poignant meditations on fatherhood, depicting a haunting broken relationship with an ethnographic father figure. Shame, desire, confusion, contempt, mental illness, ambition-- all of which scholars of affect might try to write about in others if they possibly could--are explored unrelentingly in the narrator himself, making for an exhilaratingly honest self-critique. Many ethnographies call themselves experimental. This one really is. And much of it is compulsively readable."--Susan Lepselter, Associate Professor of American Studies, Indiana University

"This book is a John Zorn ride through the anthropological looking glass. It's as if Kay Redfield Jamison traveled to a desert island with her multidisc CD player loaded with the Gin Blossoms and Ruth Behar so that she could rewrite Bronislaw Malinowski's diaries. Peter Benson navigates the reader through choppy waters that offer brutally honest and often conflicted reflections about life, fieldwork, and the sh*t show known as academia. Stuck Moving opens up new possibilities for a more self-critical and honest approach to the complexities, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the seemingly well-intentioned discipline of anthropology that often can't seem to be truthful with itself about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it in the first place."--Jason De León, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles

"Stuck Moving is a jagged little pill. This is a book that feels like a gift, a cracked portrait of a life and a world unraveling that is courageous and humbling. It also feels like an epistemic wager, as if the author is daring you to keep up with the pace and the depth and multiple registers of this unraveling." --John L. Modern, Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College

Review Quotes

"With Stuck Moving, Peter Benson has written an unconventional book. It's self-critical, honest and deeply personal. . . . It takes courage to write a book like this, and skill to write it in this way. Benson has proven both, and his book will appeal to students and professionals interested in the human behind the monograph, the person behind the tenure."

-- "Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale"

"This book would be of value to those interested in experiments in ethnographic writing or the anthropology of the United States. Faculty members or graduate students who feel conflicted about the field would find this unique book generative in their own rethinking of what anthropology might be. . . . Intimacy is essential to the kind of writing that moves us. Yet, as Benson explores over the course of the book, it is often extractive and subsequently erased in our writing in the name of professionalism. The book is a call to consider what else might be possible or if we are all simply stuck moving."-- "Anthropological Quarterly"

"Benson takes us on a wild ride of reflections and analysis. . . to lay open an academic life, a neoliberal order, and a man stuck in the middle."
-- "Missiology: An International Review"

"Peter Benson takes his readers on a wild ride into the depths of his emotional turmoil and to the limits of his profession, propelled by writing that is genre-busting and beautiful."

-- "American Anthropologist"

About the Author

Peter Benson is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Tobacco Capitalism and a coauthor of Broccoli and Desire.