Interview with Alan Klima (Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis). Alan’s most recent book, Ethnography #9 (2019, Duke University Press) won the Gregory Bateson Prize.
Hallie: You're a professor of anthropology, and you're also the creator of Academic Muse — an online community and boot camp for academic writers — so you clearly think a lot about the practice of writing. We're curious to hear how, over the years, your own thinking about writing practice has shifted or transformed.
Alan: So before I did field work and went away, I was like all the other grad students, full of anxiety and uncertainty about the future, and then all kinds of political, theoretical, and in my case theological differences with the academy that were hard to reconcile. Anyway, I was in that whole thing, and also hyper theoretical and reading things and trying to become smart and saying smart things. But then after field work, I was more committed to the writing and able to only care about that and see how it goes. Not that I wasn't also full of doubts and worries about the future, but I just had an honest commitment to trying to make my dissertation be the best thing that it could be. And so, if you can genuinely feel that commitment, that sort of trumps and silences a lot of career-oriented worries.
And the other thing that silences a lot of that stuff is daily writing. Writing every day. Because I was in graduate school, I could do that, because that was kind of my life, you know, aside from occasional TA and stuff like that, but I could do that pretty much every day. You know the feeling you get when you're in the middle of Crime and Punishment or something, and you're sitting in a crowded bus station or something like that, you crack open the book, and you're like, right in it? Whereas, for me, reading the first few pages of Crime and Punishment I’m just like, what's going on here, who's... what... what? And I have to do this work to get through the first few pages. But then once I'm into it, it's just like you just, you open the book and you're right back in there. And that's the feeling that I... that not only works, but that I kind of love. It's a good feeling when you're really doing your work, and when you can end the day and feel like you did something, you made some progress. It's a really good feeling.
And I was also really perplexed by the fact that I had put so much effort into meditation and Buddhism and all these things, and it helped with life, with a lot of effort. But I was always perplexed by the fact that writing worked way better, your feeling of contentment and ease in life — if that's going well, day after day that adds up, and then you're like, Hey, I feel good! I tried to do it another way, the way that claims to make you happy or something, but that was a lot of work, and it didn't actually work totally. But I think, being a writer and having pressures for productivity, but then also having creative aspirations and being able to realize them and express them every day, you get this feeling of rightness. And that really perplexed me, like, why couldn't all that effort in meditation and Buddhism and discipline and morality, why isn’t that working? Writing was just so much more powerful for me.
Hallie: Do you feel like your meditation practice has informed your writing practice?
Alan: Yeah, yeah. I want to come back to that. But I noticed that a lot of the talk out there, especially around academic writing, is about enduring the pain, keeping up a schedule. I realize that I also advocate for that, but I remember it feeling deeply wrong that you had to just grin and bear it and use determination and self-discipline and willpower and all these things to continue marching through that. And I understand that, I feel that way at the beginning of reading Crime and Punishment also, but it felt so wrong because I knew what the right feeling was, and the right feeling was not self-discipline. It's that [feeling of] When can I get back to the book? Oh, no, I gotta go do the laundry, crap! Anything that's not writing is like, I don't want to do it. But then while I'm doing the laundry, I just want to get back to writing. And so that feels so different from what these other people seem to be advocating about academic productivity. And I’m aware of the fact that everything I'm saying now has analogs and has been said before among fiction writers or among poets, artists, and things like that, they know what I'm talking about, but I just felt like that wasn't expressed in academic writing. So I think it's important to get to know what that state is — experiencing it, and then familiarizing yourself, with it, and realizing what it takes to get into that state. That these are the things that you need to know, and a small portion of that is learning to, you know, eat shit and like it, and to do stuff that you don't want to do, or trudge through something. There's a little bit of that, especially at the beginning, but the point is to get into a state where your writing is the first thing in your life, basically.
So the attention to state of mind, I think that would be the quick answer to the [question about] meditation. Being aware of the state of mind, and being able to keep your eye on your state of mind, is something that you learn in meditation. You might be doing something else, like paying attention to the breath, or whatever your meditation is — that's the primary text. But what it's really about is being aware of your state of mind and how things are influencing you. I think meditation helped me to identify that.
The other thing that goes with this difficulty about specifically academic writing, is that a lot of the values among artists, poets, and writers pertain to a form of writing or art-making that's different than what seems to be of value in the academy. So that's also an explanation of why... I'm just going to say this in cheeky terms, but we read sucky, unenjoyable readings. So of course, naturally, if you're going to write, you're going to feel sucky and unnatural. I think the other element... One of the things that's necessary for this state — this might just be me, but anyway, that's my teaching — is that you do need to change the form also in which you're writing. If you're trying to get into a really formulaic type of not interesting writing, then you are going to have this feeling of trudging, not being interested. So you do also need to change the form a little, and that provides a bit of excitement and can keep you interested. Earlier in my writing career I was trying to fit into the forms, but also trying to innovate and trying to find the right balance between... what could get me past this line, past that other line, you know, what could be acceptable? Dissertation: what could be acceptable. Book: how to absorb the really hostile review processes that I've been subjected to and kind of compromise with that, etc.
But things have changed recently, just a year or so ago. I've been working on this critique of the mindfulness movement in the US, which I've been working on for a long time. It was an original topic when I started, but now there's a huge literature of mindfulness-bashing — all kinds of mindfulness bashing, but also serious academic critiques that ran over some of the terrain that I was going to go over. And that I couldn't pull that off myself. I tried, I would write, and it was the trudging thing again. I even got into a moment where I was doing basic things like just write 25 minutes a day, and we're just gonna hang on and get through this somehow, or it will get better sometime. It didn't really work, and something just broke. And I suddenly realized, it's all about the moment. If you're just writing in the moment and fully committed to that anything can happen, any kind of words, there's no set idea of where it's going and what's happening. And then things really opened up for me.
I have this really complicated, weird document. Nobody really understands it. I've been giving it to people, but it's all these intellectual, philosophical poems, sometimes poem poems, and it's called — this is the title of it, seriously: The Meditation Machine vs. Counter power Shadow Psychic Stealth Spells in a World of Magic.
And I just enjoyed it so much. And then I realized that at that moment, Oh, this is what like the 17 year old writer feels, and how they decide “I'm going to be a writer. I realize I have no shot in the world, but I'm just going to do it anyway.” I was like, Oh, this is what it is. They just only care about this.
I always had wanted that in life, I always wanted to have my thing. I wanted to find my thing. I never could find my thing. But it was writing, wasn’t it? Yet I didn't have the courage to be a fiction writer, or to really commit to writing. But then I got to this moment, not too long ago from today, where I just realized, Wow, I've been so stupid, but this is the thing that I was wanting my whole life. And so many people find it when they're young, because they're not stupid like me. But anyway, I finally found it.
So right after that, I had another writing class, which I did much differently than I did in the past, and it was just collaborative writing games with a bunch of people. There happened to be some good people in the class there, and things just took off from there. And now I'm very much into improvisation. I used to be more... I had a class in the past more like a functional thing that anybody could come in with any chapter idea or thing they want to accomplish, essay or whatever, and we'd study how other people put these together. You would imitate them, and then do different ways and get that form down, and it was open to everyone. Pretty much anyone could plug themselves in, except somebody who's writing a grant proposal. It would be a little too creative for that. But now, since the most recent version of the class, I think I want to focus more on these writing activities and interactive and collaborative writing that really brings out this creative passion. And so there is a shift... the big shift has come recently, and it's much more about playing with language and with form, and it has a lot of repercussions on how you think about theory and philosophy as well.
Rima: You mentioned collaboration. Are you collaborating with these academic peers, students, other writers somewhere?
Alan: That class happened last year, and that was all graduate students from different departments, but some anthropology students. It's collaborative writing in the moment, meaning we're playing writing games or approaching ideas and discussing each other's ideas in a forum format. But now I'm going to start a new group that's has half professors, and others. I’m working with Cristiana Giordano, who's been doing fiction writing workshops, and she has a couple of collaborators I know, and I've met a few students on campus and things. We’re going to try that out in the next couple of weeks or so, and try to do it again with a mix of professors, former UC Davis students, and current students, it's about 10 to 12 people. And [that might] turn into actual collaborative writing — we might actually write something together. We'll see, but the people in the group have overlaps that I'm hoping will result in either some of the people turning some of the conversations into collaborative pieces, or my ultimate fantasy is that we make a book together, or something like that. I don't know that that's the outcome, but I do know that the activities, for the right person, they really stir up your writing energy and ability. That last workshop I did was really great, and I'm trying to replicate that.
Karīna: I'm really excited about this collaborative writing idea, but what is its place in the academic world that you described in the beginning, this kind of drudgery oriented, productivity oriented world? Or is it just tenured professors who can engage in that, and everyone else has to go through that drudgery to reach that state where you can actually be in a collaborative writing relationship?
Alan: I've noticed with the people that embrace it, once they started writing this way, things just flow out. The main thing about it is generating this creative spirit, which, in the past, things that I've been sharing online, actually, while it hasn't been about trudging exactly, it has been about consistency and getting into that idea of — open the big book, and then you're in it. But my current emphasis is going beyond consistency, and I think it's getting more to the heart of what I described to you earlier, about being in a state.
One thing I'd have to say, is that the concern over how that's going to fit into your career and your advancement, and into the disciplinary forms that are out there... that question is kind of diametrically opposed to the whole idea of it, and you have to get out of that question a little. The best answer to that would be, don't worry, trust me, you're gonna be able to kill that chapter. I can't really promise that after you’ve only completed one workshop, but I am going to ask people to come to it with that attitude, that they're just there to increase their writing chops, basically. The word chops, as far as I know, comes from electric guitar players, and guitar players with chops are the ones that can go [imitates virtuosic guitar playing]. They have certain technical abilities, and so... I know that we can cultivate those kinds of things together. And then, if you have chops, then maybe you can apply it to your academic things.
The other thing to say is that if you're doing, and I've always said this — I thought this myself, as I was a graduate student, that if you're doing things the way that the other people doing it, you're following the same theoretical trends, you're following the same forms as the other graduate students, then you have a ton of competition, because there's so many people doing that. And only some of them... whatever that is, that is the right and natural thing for certain people, and then they excel, and they're the ones that succeed. But if it's not natural to you, you're up against some stiff competition if you're going that way. Whereas if you go your own way, there's no competition. I think people understandably feel fearful and afraid, and so they go what seems like the safe route, but I've long said that that's not the safe route. It's not the safe route that has a ton of competition. That's the hard route. Going your own way, you have no competition. Whatever goodness you can produce, it can't be compared to anybody else. So there's really no good or bad. It’s automatically good. So those are attitude adjustments that might help with not following the crowd.
At the same time, I don’t want to be the Pied Piper.
Alan Klima is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of the Victor Turner Prize-winning ethnography The Funeral Casino: Meditation, Massacre, and Exchange with the Dead in Thailand (2002, Princeton University Press) and Ethnography #9 (2019, Duke University Press), which won the Gregory Bateson Prize. He is also the director of the documentary film Ghosts and Numbers (2009).