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.
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.
"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 Bronisław 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
380 pp.6 x 9Illus: 37 b/w photographs
9780520388741$29.95|£25.00Paper
Apr 2023