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| BOOK SERIES OVERVIEW
The California Series in Public Anthropology draws anthropologists to address major issues of our time in ways, that readers beyond the discipline, find valuable. Many anthropologists write on narrow subjects in self-contained styles that only coteries of colleagues appreciate. The Series strives, instead, to analyze important public concerns in ways that help non-academic audiences to understand and address them. To date, the series has enjoyed significant success. It has garnered considerable prestige within anthropology. Many prominent scholars – from Paul Farmer, Margaret Lock, and Aiwa Ong to Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Philippe Bourgois, and Carolyn Nordstrom have or, will soon, be publishing in the Series. And some of the authors, such as Paul Farmer, have not only sold well beyond the academy but their writings have helped shape how particular public problems are addressed. Still, the series remains a work in progress. Books in the Series tend to sell better than the standard 1,000 - 3,000 norm of most university presses. But many have not escaped the gravitational pull of the academy. The Series is still struggling to move beyond traditional academic audiences and styles. Prospective authors should understand the Series’ editors remain committed to moving toward a more public anthropology. In that spirit, the editors encourage prospective authors to keep five important points in mind. First, in developing their manuscripts authors should focus on questions
readers beyond the academic pale find compelling. This means forsaking
the questions that absorb anthropologists and addressing the questions
that absorb others. Third, authors’ manuscripts should tell stories. The whole manuscript could be framed as a story or, if the author prefers, stories might be used to develop concrete points. Humans, by their nature, are story tellers. We understand the world around us not only through our experiences but, also, through stories others tell about the world. The manuscript, by the way it is structured, by the way it develops its “plot,” should keep readers’ attention as good stories keep our attention while drawing us toward new insights. Fourth, a manuscript’s theoretical underpinnings should not be loudly broadcast to readers. Instead, they should be subtly embedded in the manuscript’s framing. Theoretical discussions should widen a reader’s appreciation of a problem or story. They should gently place a problem in perspective as a good poem places our experiences in perspective and gives them meaning. Theoretical discussions should not be a vehicle for credentializing an author or an author’s ideas. These need stand on their own merits. Fifth, a manuscript’s importance should not be equated with its length. The Series rarely accepts manuscripts of more than 100,000 words (including footnotes and references). It does so only in exceptional circumstances. One of the present ironies of the field is that the most appreciated and best selling anthropologically-oriented books today are written by authors with little or no formal anthropological training. Prospective authors should use these works as models in developing their manuscripts. Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down deals with miscommunications between a Laotian refugee Hmong family and the medical staff of a Merced California hospital treating the family’s epileptic daughter. It offers a nuanced, account of the problems well-intentioned people face when they talk past one another. It has received numerous honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest. The New Yorker observed "Fadiman describes with extraordinary skill the colliding worlds of Western medicine and Hmong culture." Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimed deals with how low wage workers struggle to get by in America. It tells Ehrenreich’s story, as an undercover journalist, trying to make a living in such jobs as a waitress, cleaning lady, and a Wal-Mart salesperson. The book spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was deemed a “Long-Running Best-Seller” by BusinessWeek. Gallagher, in a New York Times Book Review, described Ehrenreich as “our premier reporter of the underside of capitalism.” Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies uses an environmental/cultural/evolutionary perspective to explain how the West achieved its present global position. The book won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize and has remained on the New York Times bestseller list for almost four years. PBS has produced a documentary on it. Crosby wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Diamond “is broadly erudite, writes in a style that pleasantly expresses scientific concepts in vernacular American English, and deals almost exclusively in questions that should interest everyone concerned about how humanity has developed. . . . [He] has done us all a great favor by supplying a rock-solid alternative to the racist answer. . . . A wonderfully interesting book.” The reason the Series does not accept dissertations is because they were written for a narrow anthropological audience – one’s dissertation committee. Even revised dissertations are often problematic if the author sticks with the dissertation problem and the dissertation audience. Prospective authors should ask themselves: Are they writing for the same audience as Fadiman, Ehrenreich or Diamond? Are they dealing with problems of broad import that others, beyond the academy, find compelling? Will their relatives and friends find the manuscript absorbing? Starting in 2008, the Series will sponsor two international competitions focused on drawing anthropologists to address major public problems in readable ways. Both competitions will award book contracts at an early stage in the research/writing process in order to influence a manuscript’s subject and style. One competition will focus on mid-career professionals. The winner will be selected based on (1) the public significance of the problem being address, (2) the way the problem is to be approached in the field, and (3) the author’s ability to write for a public audience (as judged by previous publications). The winner will receive, in addition to a formal book contract from U.C. Press, a ten thousand dollar advance. The second competition focuses on graduate students preparing to conduct fieldwork. The winner will be selected based on (1) the public significance of the problem to be addressed, (2) the way the student expects to approach the problem in the field, (3) a sample of the student’s writing, and (4) a signed agreement from the student’s dissertation committee that the committee will support the student writing up his or her research in a form readable by a broad, public audience rather than as a standard academic dissertation. (For a copy of this agreement form, click here.) To learn more about these competitions, please click on this link http://www.publicanthropology.org/Bookseries/bookseries-competitions.htm. Individuals interested in submitting manuscripts to the Series should, as a first step, submit a 3-4,000 word overview of their manuscript – detailing the problems addressed, the manner in which they are addressed through the manuscript, and the style of writing used. (Obviously, a clear indication of the writing style will be the overview itself.) They should also include a chapter by chapter outline of the manuscript with three to five sentence descriptions of each chapter’s contents. These two statements should be emailed, as attachments, to borofsky@publicanthropology.org with a brief cover letter.
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