November 29, 2012

"This is a commemorative book from the convent of Remiremont (south of contemporary Nancy) whose nuns were very high ranking members of the aristocracy. It is the sort of once-common book (very few of them remain) in which nuns or monks wrote the names of members of their families and their political allies. The book was laid on the altar, so that the mass ended up being said for the salvation of all those whose names were written within, those excluded from it being damned, "deleted from the Book of Life" (see Rev.

The second volume of Liber Memorialis Von Remiremont is a facsimile of the manuscript (the original located at the Biblioetheca Angelica in Rome).

"The writing is not always elegant, but the core ideas are very important. As the ethnographer travels in space, he also travels in time, back towards the primitive, the pre-modern. Yet the condition of successful fieldwork demands what Fabian calls "Coevalness," that is, an acceptance of the mutual "presentness" of both field-worker and the people studied. But then, the conventions of social science require that "otherness" be reintroduced in books and articles, denying the "Coevalness" that made the fieldwork possible in the first place.

"This is the study that gave rise to the theory of "speech acts" and "performative acts," a central concept of my book. It is not an easy read, but the idea is powerful (and much of subsequent linguistics and rhetorical theory is based on it). For Austin, some of the most interesting things about language are the ways we use it to do things that have nothing to do with vocabulary and syntax.

"I have always thought that any good ethnologist (or historian, or sociologist) already understood the arguments Bourdieu makes in this book. But no book makes them so comprehensively, with such consistent insight."

"If one wants to know what is new in the way we understand the interest and importance of the early middle ages, this is as good and comprehensible an introduction as one will find."

"With the possible exception of Richard Rorty's books, I know of no other study that manages to think so deeply and explain so well how it is that human beings can communicate with each other. In fact, perhaps the book's greatest value is that it not only explains communication but also the myriad ways communication consistently fails (for we do not, after all, see into another person's mind to 'read' his or her thoughts; we only see signs that indicate, 'Take this seriously')."

"This may be the single best, most moving, most powerful article I have read. The idea of 'invisible Kilimanjaros' has stayed with me for years. Even more important, at least to me, was Fields' ability to articulate the injustice we do to the past in thinking we can understand it better than those who suffer through it."

"An engagingly written demonstration of why we can never assume that the meaning of words is obvious."