SIENNA CRAIG

ANTHROPOLOGY

FAVORITE BOOKTOTEACH:

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman

MUST-READ BOOK IN YOUR FIELD:

No Aging in India, by Lawrence Cohen

FAVORITE PLEASURE READ:

Poetry by various authorsPablo Neruda, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver

CURRENTLY READING:

Goat Song, by Brad Kessler

Fadiman's book is a beautifully written and very well researched story about encounters of healing and medicine across cultures. In a nutshell, it is the story of a Hmonggirl from Merced, California, who has what her biomedical doctors call epilepsy and what her Hmongfamily understands as the blessing and curse of someone who can become a great shaman. It is also a story about migration, social change and the culture of biomedicine. Since I'm a medical anthropologist the theme works well in a lot of my classes—from first-year seminars to large intro courses in cultural anthropology.

There are lots of mustread books in cultural anthropology. I picked Cohen because it is one of those ethnographies that is so dense and well researched on the one hand, but on the other reads like a good NewYorker article in places, fiction in others. The book is about conceptions of madness, senility and old age in India and the United States. The book also has a lot to say about the relationship between individuals and society, about the cultural construction of social norms and about the place of the ethnographer in the research and writing we do.

Poetry condenses meaning, touch, thought, human emotion in such amazing ways. I love the precision of poems, as well as their capacity for humility, grace, even sharp social criticism. The economy of words in poems moves me deeply and makes me think about how I use language.