Stuck Moving

Or, How I Learned to Love (and Lament) Anthropology

Peter Benson

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520388734
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520388758
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

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

• Cover
• Series Editors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• 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
• Series