John Hartigan: The Discipline of brevity

and entails, as Engelke puts it, “speaking to your people in ways that they are not generally addressed.” But, there is also the goal of “articulating a vision of your subject for an audience that is broader than your own intellectual community.” The Press’ goal is to “prompt specialists to write in ways that will reach broader audiences.” Achieving both goals in a small space is a demanding task and Engelke acknowledges, as do our other ATG interviewees, that it can be a lot harder to write a short book than one of conventional academic length. We hope, he says, for “more bang for the buck.” But, there can be scale even within limits. Thus, “we want people to make big claims if not quite in the same way that academic work generally does.” Engelke knows, of course, about the habits of academic authors. “They think they have a lot to say and that they need to say it.” But he has found that in many cases they don’t really need to.

Prickly Paradigm urges authors to “throw caution to the wind” and even to make a point with urgency and some drama — to aim for “railroading through a big argument.” Engelke recognizes, of course, that not all scholarly work can be presented in such a way. In an interview with Creative Commons, Sahlins urged authors to find opportunities to “just let go [and] get something off your chest without having a big scholarly apparatus.”

Paradigm is selling fewer books “out of the gate” than it used to and it is moving to print on demand. But Engelke is optimistic about the future of short books. “Everyone now is trying them.” But he worries about the “flip side” of this new publishing interest and, of course, the preference in today’s digital society for speed in all forms of communications. Engelke asks “Are we doing enough to maintain the long book (citing Robert Caro’s The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York [1974; 1,246 pages] and David blight’s Frederick Douglass [2019; 992 pages])? Publishers have to wonder whether more and more scholars will approach books like these and say in the argot of teenagers: “TL; DR.”

With the activities of major university presses, the prospects for publishing a short book are better than ever. According to Engelke even a small independent operation like Prickly Paradigm gets many submissions, though there are some from authors who don’t appear familiar with the unusual format. The press has also discouraged citation conventions like footnotes and a list of “Works Cited” at the end. Even though authors understood the format some would, Engelke reports, “freak out” about the restrictions. But “the policy may now give way, as public claims are made for ‘alternative facts,’ to a limited number of citations, particularly in political books.”

Some Prickly Paradigm books appear in what is, in effect, an Open Access format (or free online). But, the Press doesn’t recognize OA as a formal category of its work. So, too has Prickly Paradigm, apart from a short time when it posted PDFs of citations for its books and declined to capitalize on the digital enhancements available to authors and publishers of short books. Contemplating the announcement that Cambridge university Press will feature annual online updates in its Elements series, Engelke speaks for the permanent text, one that “marks a moment in time.” And the prospect of Open Access for a small publisher reminds him that “nothing is free.” There are, he agrees, examples of building sales of print side-by-side with Open Access but for now, at least, the Prickly Paradigm will stick with tradition.

Like other publishers of short books Engelke recognizes their uncertain place in the academic reward system. “There are spoken and unspoken expectations.” One of the most powerful in the first category is peer review. Prickly Paradigm’s books are only occasionally peer reviewed. They reflect only the judgements of its editors. Engelke acknowledges that “they are not what the academic machine requires.” Peer review likely strengthens the value of short books for authors seeking promotion and tenure. They may be “risky” for others. But Prickly Paradigm has few authors who don’t already have substantial scholarly records. Most already hold tenure and are secure in their careers. “They will take the risk.” And there are those who “can’t find a suitable place for a long article and will consider making it into a short book.” They will then find what others see as distinctive about the format and about the Press’ aspirations for a different kind of audience. One Prickly author told Sahlins “I’m proud to be associated with a press like that.” But as far as the academic reward system is concerned, Engelke says “it is very hard to get things to change.”

Engelke recognizes the appeal of digital publications. And, though he is mindful of how much gets done with the smallest of staffs, he regrets that Prickly Paradigm doesn’t have a more active visible presence to make its books more visible. Then, again, he reasserts the Press’ commitment to the physical book, even “in a sense as a ‘fetish object.’” There is an element of “desire” in finding and reading them. He says, with a smile, “You just want to own it, to eat it, to put it in your pocket.”

by Steven Weiland (Professor, Department of Educational Administration, Michigan State University) <weiland@msu.edu>

Written by Steven Weiland based on a Zoom conversation with John Hartigan, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the University of Texas on September 18, 2020. Interviews were sometimes edited for clarity. John Hartigan is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies at the university of Texas. He is the author of What Can You Say?: America’s National Conversation About Race (Stanford University Press, 2010), Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the Science of Plant Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) and other books. continued on page 26

In 2015 the university of Minnesota Press published Hartigan’s Aesop’s Anthropology, one of the first three in the series named Forerunners, a vanguard effort in short books as explained earlier in this section of ATG by Susan Doerr. Hartigan was an experienced author of academic books but he welcomed the opportunity to do something different. The Press was seeking, in its words, to “give authors space to explore idea-driven works that often aren’t taken up by university presses…to combine the value of an academic publisher — peer review, editorial guidance, copyediting, and production — with the timeliness of agile publishing tools.” As an adventurous ethnographer who also worked in adjacent disciplines, Hartigan represented how, as the Press hoped to demonstrate, “intense thinking, change, and speculation happens in scholarship.”

In announcing Forerunners, Minnesota identified what might be thought of by a scholar as “too short for a book but [something] you don’t want to be languishing in your desk drawer.” Hartigan accepted an invitation to write Aesop’s Anthropology when he expressed to an editor that he was uncertain about the best way to get from a project he had just finished to another book but one which was still only partially formed in his thinking. “What happens,” he asks, “in cases where thoughts want to stay in motion?” He recognizes that “The answer generally has been to write another book, which, under the best circumstances, can take years.” Instead Hartigan proposes that scholarly authors, working in the short-format eBook and using social media, can “write a book continuously.” Aesop’s Anthropology is actually a series of brief essays responding to one basic question: “What can we learn about sociality from other species, once we suspend the belief that it is the unique possession and characteristic of humans?” The short book represents in a uniquely accessible way the problem that holds all of Hartigan’s work together.

How did Hartigan imagine an audience for a short book? When he was working on Aesop’s Anthropology, he realized that he liked the idea of getting a reader to “take him seriously for a couple of hours and then get up and talk to somebody.” He believes that a book that can be read in one sitting or so is much more likely to be the subject of conversation among readers and colleagues close to the act of reading itself. That gives such interchanges a kind of immediacy we don’t get in personal communications about books that are read over days or weeks or months. But Hartigan also had the classroom in mind. That’s why, while his book is short, it still has fifteen chapters and corresponds, like a textbook, to the weeks in a semester.

Hartigan says that the short book format helped him to think about his writing more flexibly. He welcomed the attention the Press was giving to building audiences. But, “There’s more to this than marketing. Seeing the essays as templates, I was able to write on new topics before Aesop’s was even released. Laying out a framework of speculative ideas allowed me to develop them sporadically, in turn, as new instances arose — in the media or everyday life — rather than having to hive to the scholastic argument format.” For a time, Hartigan used a blog that extended his thinking in Aesop’s Anthropology. And he found the pace of the project appealing. “It was possible to avoid the maddening wait to get something into print. Glaciers melt faster than monographs move through the scholarly publishing system.” The Press reduced the time from peer review and a copyedited manuscript to publication from what was often a year or more to half as much.

Hartigan learned that the short book and social media could support his work together, revealing important connections, with articles and books “coalescing in ways he didn’t anticipate.” He welcomed what the pace of short book publishing meant for his thinking: “Who doesn’t like to be surprised by where their own writing leads?”

In effect, Hartigan’s experience with a short book influenced how he thought about the relations between his scholarly routines and innovation in publishing. “The best part is that though I keep accumulating more material than I know what to do with, my anxieties over what to do with it all are dissolving. I’m just watching what unfolds and trying to learn from it all, rather than worrying about how it will fit in the next book — or anticipating all that won’t make it between the next set of covers.”

Asked about the common view that short books are unimportant or even frivolous, with minimal value in the academic reward system, Hartigan said that such was what his department chair appears to have thought when Aesop’s Anthropology appeared. He received this one line note from him: “96 pages!?” Faced with professional skepticism about short books, younger scholars may be reluctant to experiment. Hartigan believes that institutions — from the President on down — need to be educated about new developments in publishing, including the timeliness of the short book. He hopes that with activity from many presses in short books standards will emerge that define the form without discouraging expressive variety. “The library can help by promoting the short book among campus readers of all kinds.” The university of Minnesota Press hopes for an audience of “general readers” for Forerunners. But Hartigan acknowledges that for the short book, as with all specialized work, “getting noticed” is never easy. The problem may be compounded with expectations for iterative publishing as with the plans of the Cambridge university Press to have authors of its short books (as in its Elements series) revise their work annually. Hartigan likes the idea of revising the story a book tells as the world changes but “How do you keep readers coming back? It may work for fan fiction but maybe not for scholarship.”

While a short book can satisfy an author’s wish for more speed in scholarly communications Hartigan believes that it demands just as much effort in writing as one of conventional length. He has published five university press monographs. The short book takes discipline: “I still struggle with the simple declarative sentence. It is hard to be concise. And as we write we are thinking through the process. Often you don’t understand what you know until you get to the end. The problem then is getting enough out and retaining the process of thought. I can say that I put as much composing time into Aesop’s Anthropology as I have in the 300 or so page book about to be published [Shaving the Beasts: Wild Horses and Ritual in Spain, also with the university of Minnesota Press].