10 Monographs or essays or essay collections that have stayed with me

[doodlesinsand]

Copying&pasting over from tumblr because I am lazy and tired. This is basically a meme in which you, well, do the following. Here are my texts! (I also did one on fiction a while back, but I think that's been lost to the recesses of tumblr.)
[Choose 10 (or more, or less) essays, monographs or other theoretical texts which have stayed with you, made a difference, or influenced you. Feel free to think about your choices as long and hard as you wish] from radiantsquid

1. Motel of the Mysteries by David Macaulay - this book really shaped how I think about history, anthropology, and academia in general, and brought to my awareness some of the potential traps we might fall into when thinking about cultures removed in time and/or space
2. Cultural Materialism by Marvin Harris - my distaste for and disagreement with this book and position was so immediate and so powerful, it prompted me to consider and define exactly how and why I didn’t like it and what that meant for where I stood. No one ever said you had to like the things that influence you.
3. The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin - a classic of environmental literature, I’ve discovered that it doesn’t always hold true and find that I’m now troubled by its ethnocentric perspective, but it’s remained an important influence on my thought regardless.
4. The Method of Multiple Working Hypotheses by T C Chamberlin - Chamberlin encourages his audiences to envision as many possible scenarios as they can and to do their best not to favor one explanation over the others, instead waiting to see which the evidence bears out. It seems like it should be obvious, but it truly is/was a revolutionary counter to how hypotheses function in the scientific process as it’s normally understood.
5. Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner - growing up in the desert myself, I always understood water was important, but I didn’t understand how it functioned regionally and historically until I read this masterpiece of environmental literature.
6. The Story of English by Robert McCrum, Robert MacNeil, and William Cran - a book that is never far from my thoughts, this was my introduction to linguistics and etymology, two fields which fascinate me to this day. Everything about this book informs how I read, how I write, and how I interact with the English language and with language in general.
7. Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace - truly, I have never been more influenced by an author I’ve only read one work by.
8. Explaining Human Actions and Environmental Changes by Andrew P Vayda - Vayda is an incredibly important author in how I think about anthropology, and perhaps the anthropological theorist I like best.
9. The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan - this was the first full-length book we read in my Intro to Cultural Anthropology class, and no one in the years before us read it and thus far neither has anyone in the years after us, and so I was incredibly lucky. I never would have read this book on my own, and I would have missed an incredible assessment of the relationship between humans and the plants we cultivate, how we change and are changed by the world around us.
10. Desire of the Everlasting Hills by Thomas Cahill - Cahill is one of my absolute favorite historians, and this book along with several others in his “Hinges of History” series have dramatically shaped how I think about religion on several levels. My own faith has been affirmed and irreversibly changed by his work, how I think about Christianity and its development has been challenged and reworked, and I’ve become far more careful about and interested in dealing with religion at all. He’s an incredible historian and his analysis from that perspective is not to be missed, but it’s in terms of religion that he’s had the biggest impact on me.
11. Black Elk Speaks by John G Neihardt - I can’t even begin to describe how and why this book is so important to me; it speaks deeply to issues of culture and race and history that affect our country even today, and the profound effect it had on me was dramatically increased by reading it for the first time while in the Black Hills.