A Response to World as Laboratory by Rebecca Lemov

In World as Laboratory, Rebecca Lemov, an anthropologist, writes for a larger audience. “I think it’s too bad that a lot of scholarly work never gets read, usually because it’s just plain difficult to read,” she says in an interview with Nicole Merritt of MyShelf.com. “Being difficult is sometimes necessary, but sometimes there’s deliberate obfuscation going on … ‘If you can’t understand what I’m saying, I must be exceptionally smart’.” David Brooks reviewed it at The New York Times, an honor not always bequeathed to anthropological texts. The paperback is published by Hill and Wang, rather than an academic press, and the book is written in a humorous, even sarcastic tone, in accessible language that feels like a leisure read full of rich philosophical implications and shocking detail. The focus of the work is how the... [read full story]