Scholarly Cartoons
In school, I doodled in class; in graduate school and throughout my professional career, I made abstractions and insights visible by drawing them. I illustrated points and conflicts in faculty meetings. In the last decades of my career, I studied the global art market and nationalism, sprinkling the resulting book (The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress) with ironic visual commentary.
My most elaborate cartoon is below, created as a gift for colleagues. I took copious notes during their four-hour panel at the American Anthropological Association annual meeting, then ran home, re-read Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Totemism (it’s a short book, and I needed quotes), then constructed this lesson in dualism and French Structuralism with the aid of a layout designer. Suitable for classroom use!
Below that, scroll through the cleaned-up versions of sketches made hither and yon on random papers, reflecting on ideas and theories I encountered in the course of reading and listening to professional lectures.
