Cross-posted from Dead Voles. It speaks to the interests of several here.

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Kirin Narayan’s Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov is not a book likely to make it onto bestseller lists. The audience, people with an interest in the art of writing ethnography, is too small. It is, however, a marvelous book about writing non-fiction prose, taking as…

Vanity fair has extracted an essay on Orwell from Christopher Hitchen's introduction to Orwell's Diaries. The lead for the Arts & Letters Daily link that led me to this essay reads,

Being an amateur anthropologist, understanding things – poverty and squalor, politics, himself – at the level of basic experience...

The…

This weekend Ruth and I were in Ikebukuro, on the other side of Tokyo from where we live in Yokohama, attending the Asian Studies Japan Conference (ASJC). It was the first time for this conference in several years, so impressions were fresh and lively. What follows is a reflection on why I enjoyed the conference so much, for reasons summed up in my title "The Joy of Substance."