Too long for a comment

This post started as a comment on a Savage Minds post, "What is good anthropological writing?", wherein Thomas Eriksen asked, "Which were the texts that made an indelible impression on you, and why?" The following is my answer:

The texts, both fiction and non-fiction, which have "made an indelible impression" on me as an Anthropologist, scholar, and all the other titles (daughter, sister, artist, friend) I hold as a person in general, came to me in three ways at three different times:

First, when I was 12 years old, my family took a trip to Seattle. I didn't have any unread books of my own to bring along for the plane ride, so I went into our family book closet and pulled from the shelf that held my Dad's books from college, John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. When we returned home, I went straight back to that shelf and grabbed a box set of Doonesbury comics. As this was before the Internet, I got through Doonesbury by using my children's encyclopedia, our family encyclopedias, my Mom's textbook from the History class she was taking at the community college (she went back to school when I was in Kindergarten, working full-time and taking classes when she could until I was in 8th grade), and my parents as references for all the historical and political commentary I did not understand.

When I finished that collection, I returned to the shelf and chose (no kidding) Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. I should mention that my dad was an Anthropology and Spanish undergrad and my inclination towards Anthropology was greatly influenced by all the stories I grew up hearing my Dad tell. As a child, my Dad lived on the outskirts of various Native American reservations across New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado. After he graduated from college, he joined the Peace Corps and lived in a Shuar village in Ecuador. Aside from the tales he recounted of these experiences, he seemed to have an Anthropological anecdote for and spin on everything, from problems with bullies at school to my inquiry, "Why would the US government send people to internment camps?" when my family visited Manzanar National Historic Site when I was in 4th grade. So, by the time I got around to reading Coming of Age, I was already prepared to enjoy it.

Next, during my Senior year of high school, I was taking both AP English and AP Biology (AP stands for "Advanced Placement," the "recommended courses" for students aspiring to attend universities considered elite, in my case the University of California. In these classes, the pace of learning was sped up and the expectation of quality of work was raised, this meant that you had more than twice as much homework and it had to be at least twice as good as that in the "regular" classes, which meant that you had to form "study groups" and divide the work amongst each other in order to deliver, something that was expressly forbidden and considered "cheating" by teachers but accepted and practiced as the norm by students. And, because classes, like all others at my high school, were scheduled for only 50 minutes each day, you were often expected, pretty much required, to spend lunches, free periods, and time after school in lab or other lecture/discussion type sessions. Finally, at the end of the course, you had the option of taking the corresponding AP test. Scores of 3 or higher, out of 5, would pass you out of entry level courses at many universities and so you worked very hard to obtain them. These were my experiences at one particular high school in an affluent area where over 90% of the graduating class went on to attend college, and so may not be the most "normal" representation of college prep courses). I was one of several students who were taking both classes at the same time and so our teachers decided to do a joint project, "What is life?" How do you define "life?" What does it mean to "be alive?" This project itself was influential for me because we studied the concept of "being alive" from and within two different disciplines. I remember one particular discussion in Bio when we debated whether or not a virus should be classified as a living organism. This debate forced us to realize that scientific classification and the concept of "being alive" are arbitrary, cultural constructions. Each class also had its own theme, in English it was existentialism and in Bio it was, well, Bio. In English, our study of existentialism included the reading of William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Second Coming", Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot, and Franz Kafka's short story, In the Penal Colony. These English class texts were all fiction, but in Bio, I read David Quammen's The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature which gets its title from Quammen's imaginative account of Darwin's study of Galapagos Island iguanas; the iguanas are strong swimmers, but as Darwin wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle, "they will sooner allow a person to catch hold of their tails than jump into the water..." Quammen's book is sort of non-fiction in that he transforms scientific information into interesting, anecdotal stories. In the case of the iguanas, Quammen imagines Darwin launching them by their tails into the sea and watching them swim back to the shore where he stands. This text was influential for me because it demonstrates how good writing intrigues the reader by prompting her to draw parallels between the mundane and the academic.

Lastly, during my Freshman year of university, a friend lent me his copy of Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. I can't explain why this book was so influential, I think I just really admire Robbins' writing style. Another great, influential book by Robbins is Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates.

So, there you have it, the texts that changed my life!