The title of Roy Wagner’s latest work, Coyote Anthropology, hints at several possible topics the book might cover, all of which promise an interesting ride. The lack of a subtitle affords no clarification, but that may well have been intentional on Wagner’s part. This book is not meant to be easily apprehended. That is not to say that this is a difficult or unusable book. It is neither of these things, but it is a book that does not want to be immediate, obvious, or even inviting of the casual reader. It would be wrong to say that Wagner does not want to be understood in this text, but he does want to have some fun in the course of moving toward understanding. This book is meant to be a playful exploration of a set of ideas, and in that effort, Wagner is mostly successful.
Nominally a book about the ideas contained in Carlos Castaneda’s works and their usefulness to anthropology, Coyote Anthropology takes the form of a conversation, or series of conversations, between the author, Roy, and another character named Coyote. The Coyote of the book is part Platonic conversational foil, part vaudevillian straight man, and part Wagner alter-ego. To be sure, there is quite a bit of Wagner’s ego in this text, but it is not necessarily a fault. Wagner admits in the prologue that this book is an indulgence:
“[A]s we have seen, funny is never really funny until and unless it manages to outrage and overplay its original intent and purpose, tipping the balance it was originally set up to restore. Accordingly, have gone to great lengths to achieve a kind of insouciant Genaro-effect by making use of gross puns, bad jokes, and sonnets and other verses of questionable merit, along with manic expressions of super-serious outrage. I sincerely hope and trust that the reader will indulge me in this” (x).
Wagner is successful in these achievements, although at times the book does cross a line to self-indulgence. His jokes and sonnets (both terms at times used very loosely) are easily understood as part of the game, but Wagner’s yen for wordplay at points feels a bit forced and self-centered. In the main, however, Wagner does a good job of using humor and the novelty of dialogic structure to foster a different kind of conversation about anthropology and meaning. These topics are ground Wagner has visited before, and Coyote Anthropology fits nicely alongside other of his works, such as An Anthropology of the Subject and Symbols that Stand for Themselves.
That being said, it is difficult to discuss what this book is actually about. The book certainly has topics, as indicated by its section titles: Tricking Magic, Expersonation, Obviation, and The Book of Symmetries. However, it would not be very effective to try to explain the book by doing the chapter-by-chapter synopsis that is the norm for academic journal reviews. This book is better thought of as a holistic intellectual experience, rather than a standard, divisible academic text. Reading Coyote Anthropology calls to mind a combination of the Republic, Gabriel García Márquez, and Robert Anton Wilson, although my first reading of the book reminded me of nothing so much as Michael Taussig’s Magic of the State. Like Taussig in Magic of the State, Wagner demands that the reader remove her/himself from normal assumptions and understandings, although Wagner’s playfulness feels less like an attempt to be threatening than Taussig’s book.
Coyote Anthropology begins with a story, a humorous narrative from Native North America about Coyote tricking an Anglo trader out of all his possessions. Full disclosure requires me to tell you that this particular tale was a favorite of mine when I was being paid to tell stories, but it serves the book well by setting an irreverent, clever, and oppositional tone.
Wagner proceeds from this story to his exploration of various topics, including several of the anthropology standbys, such as taboo, kinship, and spatial distribution. All of these topics serve Wagner’s larger goal, however, of exploring meaning and meaning-making. While this book will never be mistaken for a typical ethnography, it does bear the marks of an ethnographer’s hand. Wagner does a good job of constantly questioning assumptions, disallowing intellectual complacency, and forcing the reader deeper into the conversation about meaning and meaning-making. However, he never does break away from one fundamental assumption: that meaning resides outside the human experience. Drawn largely from Wittgenstein, this idea permeates Wagner’s analysis, and it never seems to come into question within the text. From the beginning of the book, where the character Roy says, “we see what we know but do not really know what we see, given that the meanings are real enough but the meanings of those meanings are not” (4-5, emphasis in original), to the very end of the book, where the character Coyote states, “And that, in turn, brings us to the most profound of all Wittgenstein’s insights […]: ‘The meanings of this world must lie outside of this world’” (198, emphasis in original), Wagner leaves as granted that “meaning” is a category that must exist outside of the human level. Perhaps a deeper exploration of that notion would be worthwhile.
Despite that criticism, Wagner has crafted a thought-provoking book, without a doubt. Given the playful challenge woven throughout the text, I think he would be pleased to read that this is a book that provokes, almost challenges, the reader to think, and then to think further. It is a playful work, but the coyote inside shows teeth when it laughs, teeth that can also bite. Above everything else, Coyote Anthropology will be an acquired taste. If the reader has a proclivity for thought experiments, exploratory rumination, and pushing boundaries, then this book is worth a look. The denseness of the topics covered and the lack of fully explained arguments makes this book unsuitable to a lower-level classroom, but focused upper-level undergrads and grad students might be able to make use of Wagner’s latest work. And anyone with an interest in the more philosophical or metaphysical dimensions of anthropology should take a look as well.
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[Review length: 1019 words • Review posted on January 13, 2018]