Stuck Moving

"This moving, often-hilarious, always-provocative mix of ethnography, memoir, creative writing, and critical cultural studies is a tour de force of intertextual bricolage. The narrator’s ambivalent entanglement with liberal-academic bourgeois cultural capital saturates his poignant meditations on fatherhood, depicting a haunting broken relationship with an ethnographic father figure. Shame, desire, confusion, contempt, mental illness, ambition— all of which scholars of affect might try to write about in others if they possibly could—are explored unrelentingly in the narrator himself, making for an exhilaratingly honest self-critique. Many ethnographies call themselves experimental. This one really is. And much of it is compulsively readable."—Susan Lepselter, Associate Professor of American Studies, Indiana University

"This book is a John Zorn ride through the anthropological looking glass. It’s as if Kay Redfield Jamison traveled to a desert island with her multidisc CD player loaded with the Gin Blossoms and Ruth Behar so that she could rewrite Bronisław Malinowski's diaries. Peter Benson navigates the reader through choppy waters that offer brutally honest and often conflicted reflections about life, fieldwork, and the sh*t show known as academia. Stuck Moving opens up new possibilities for a more self-critical and honest approach to the complexities, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the seemingly well-intentioned discipline of anthropology that often can’t seem to be truthful with itself about what we are doing, how we are doing it, and why we are doing it in the first place."—Jason De León, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles

"Stuck Moving is a jagged little pill. This is a book that feels like a gift, a cracked portrait of a life and a world unraveling that is courageous and humbling. It also feels like an epistemic wager, as if the author is daring you to keep up with the pace and the depth and multiple registers of this unraveling." —John L. Modern, Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall College