Scholarly jabs
Ryan writes about the lost art of academic jibes. He’s a little pessimistic - take this recent gem of a footnote from Richard Drayton’s recent book Nature’s Government
‘”I owe a particdular debt to Mr. Desmond for rescuing me from writing the more parochial history of Kew which would have followed from the publication of my doctoral dissertation. He read and commented on it in 1994, but failed to cite it since, he later advised me, he had ‘put it aside’ before writing. I take encouragement from the fact that Desmond was able so often to agree with the patterns and periods I had described for Kew’s history”‘
Timothy Mitchell’s otherwise wonderful latest book on colonial and post-colonial Egypt contains the most elaborate academic flaming I have ever read. Chapter 4 purports to be an expose of the dubious intellectual genealogy of ‘peasant studies’. In fact, it’s an extended critique of a single author, the American journalist/pop anthropologist Richard Critchfield. Mitchell describes his work as “a collage of familiar Orientalist images juxtaposed with clippings taken - in fact plagiarized - from earlier writings”. As if 20 pages dissecting Critchfield’s study of an Egyptian village isn’t enough, then comes a six-page postscript, explaining that after the chapter first appeared as an article in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Critchfield wrote to him to defend his “paraphrases” of other work, and then died shortly after - a death that Mitchell recounts with juicy irony, coming as it did on the occasion of a publication party for one of the books Mitchell has just dismantled. Critchfield’s departure presumably frees Mitchell sufficiently from defamation law to spend the next four pages suggesting that Critchfield was in fact not principally an anthropologist or a journalist at all, but actually a CIA agent. The individuals thanked in Critchfield’s prefaces - the wife of the CIA director Richard Helms, Robert McNamara, and others - were “unusually well placed associates for a man who insisted in each of his books that he was just a journalist who wrote about peasants in obscure parts of the world. One might also notice the way his choice of villages, always portrayed as out-of-the-way places, followed the changing focus of U.S. imperial concerns, some of them at the time quite secretive.” A beautiful join-the-dots conspiracy theory finishes the piece, with Mitchell tracking Critchfield’s hidden hand from the CIA training of Tibetan guerilla refugees in 1960s Nepal, to mid-60s Vietnam, the CIA’s backing of Suharto’s 1966 coup in Indonesia, the 12:17 pm
Thanks Mike, that’s wonderful!
Comment by Dan — March 3, 2005 @ 7:29 pm