Novel explores village-atmosphere
Retired Butte College and Chico State anthropology instructor Mike Findlay brings insights from cultural and linguistic anthropology to a fictional academic community at Lannat State University, located somewhere in the Midwest.
His novel traces the academic career of Peter Shaughnessy, from his hiring at Lannat to his retirement from the Anthropology Department. Findlay draws on his own experiences, and stories he’s heard from others — all suitably altered “to protect identities and circumstances” — to observe, with a dollop of sarcasm, his own profession.
Through Peter and his colleagues (not modeled, the author is quick to say, on himself or other real people) Findlay presents institutions of higher education as “merely the new villages occupying a more rapidly changing human encrusted landscape.” There are tribes here, too, even in the old red schoolhouse building converted to serve Lannat State.
“The Tribe In The Red Brick House” ($2.99 in Amazon Kindle edition, self-published) by Michael Shaw Findlay is part
of a three-book series, “Through An Anthropologist’s Looking Glass.” (I volunteered to format the manuscript and upload it to Amazon.) The story begins with a long, brutally honest speech, an assessment
of the anthropological enterprise in academia, given to majors by an unnamed professor, who is later revealed to be Peter.
What follows are chapters introducing some of the “tribe,” fellow anthropologists at Lannat who regularly congregate at the Coachman, a local pub, to drink Golden Ale and muse about the day’s happenings. There’s Fran, longtime Department Chair, Saul (one of the key figures in the novel), and a sarcastic Brit who calls himself Jacko. There are oddballs, too, not really part of the tribe, including Cliff, an obnoxious conservative, and Eaon, who practices something called “transcendental anthropology.”
Each series of events is introduced in an anthropological setting, and faddish fashions come in for skewering, including political correctness (for missing cultural context when “forbidden words” are used) and “learning outcomes” (for measuring the wrong things).
Peter learns to navigate department meetings and Curriculum Committee politics, but there comes a fateful day when he must confront stupidity, violence, and the overwhelming demands of academia, and readers will find this novelistic ethnography is also emotionally resonant.