Peter Benson

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

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 parodying the discipline's function as culture resource for global health and the neoliberal university, this book unsettles anthropology's hopeful claims about its own role in social change.