Stuck Moving: Or, How I Learned to Love (and Lament) Anthropology(9 Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century)

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.

Table of Contents:
Contents List of Figures  Acknowledgments  Author’s Note  1. Sixteen Candles  2. Lost in Translation  3. And Everything Is Going Fine  4. Murmur of the Heart  5. Do the Right Thing  6. Rushmore  7. Toy Story  8. Shame  9. Life Is Sweet  10. The Graduate  11. My Own Private Idaho  12. Boyhood  13. Broken Flowers  14. Stagecoach  15. The Red Balloon  16. Planet of the Apes  Credits  Bibliography  Index   

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.  

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."  "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."   "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." "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."